


gæð a wyrd swa hio scel

by kangeiko



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Hela does what she wants, Loki (Marvel) Does What He Wants, M/M, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Post-Thor (2011), Post-Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Post-Thor: The Dark World, Pre-Thor (2011), Sibling Incest, The Many Deaths of Loki Odinson, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-18
Updated: 2019-04-18
Packaged: 2019-12-25 22:39:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 27,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18270623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kangeiko/pseuds/kangeiko
Summary: Five times Hela kicked Loki out of Hel (and one time Thor had to go and fetch him).





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mithborien](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mithborien/gifts).



> The title - _(fate goes ever as she shall)_ \- is from Beowulf, relating to the Norn Wyrd (destiny/fate). I have played fast and loose with both Norse mythology and the MCU, but, well, so did Marvel. 
> 
> A million thank yous to my beta readers, sistersophie, stelleappease and roguefaerie, who did amazing work kicking this into shape.

_ In the beginning… _

_ That is how all stories start, is it not? _

_ In the beginning was the world. The world was Niflheim, and it was a barren place, devoid of all life. No trees grew nor grasses swayed on its rocky plains, and the wind that whistled across its peaks and valleys was a pitiless thing, wild and hungry. It was a hard world, a realm blasted to ash by the relentless sun overhead. _

_ The first souls that arrived on Niflheim, naked and shivering, lasted a bare few days before the howling gales consumed them. It tore the thin protection of their forms asunder and bled their essence dry until there was nothing left. The empty echo of their hollow souls wandered Niflheim thereafter, heard only in the susurration of the wind. The ones who followed those unfortunates did not fare much better, their essence eroded to a thin, pathetic shadow, swallowed by the endless storm.  _

_ Oh, Niflheim! Niflheim the cruel, its denizens called it, Niflheim the unjust. The mistress that would hear no pleas and delivered no mercy, the devourer of souls! Niflheim the foul, Niflheim the undeserved torment that plagued those souls whose only crime had been a death that would not send them to Valhalla.  _

Was this fair?  _ The souls of the dead would cry out in their agony. They had done no wrong, they had no great sin against their names nor stains of dishonour. And yet the winds of Niflheim heard them not, and did not yield, nor take pity upon them.  _

_ Such was the realm of the dead, unloved and unjust, where the blameless toiled in the noonday sun, endless, endless, until their wretched souls were utterly spent. _

_ And then, one day, Hela came. _

*

The city gates arched high into the Niflheim sky in an echo of the ribs they had been hewn from. Leviathans were the only things large enough to yield such bones, and Hela had rationed their use carefully. She’d had to re-form the gates four times since her arrival, and it was a task growing more unpleasant with each repeat.

Of course, gates which could not open and close were of no use at all.

“ I’m surrounded by morons,” Hela muttered as she inspected the easternmost gate. The hinges were rusted and discoloured, and there was a hairline crack running through the wood.

“ I’m sorry, your grace,” the gatekeeper, Calder, murmured, his eyes downcast. “We… we thought that…” He seemed to think better of what he had intended to say and shrank down further into himself, his shoulders hunching. It was almost comical in a man his size. She’d picked him to be gatekeeper because he’d been one of the few Aesir strong enough to open and close the doors, and although she had a lot of use for the Jötnar in their midst, handing them the keys to her stronghold was not one of them.

She was starting to wonder whether she had misjudged. The Jötnar were unlikely to have missed something as significant as degradation in her seiðr. Of course, she would have found out about it when they tried to move against her, but it was still likely to have been earlier than  _ this _ . How long had Calder sat on the damage before finally requesting she intervene?

“ I don’t require you to think, Calder,” she said, her voice tight. She had a hand on the nearest hinge and was probing the edges of it with her mind. “I require you to follow orders.”

“ Yes, your grace,” Calder said, abashed. He glanced at the hinge and gulped. “Is it repairable?”

_ Is it repairable, he asks me, _ Hela thought sourly, all of her powers focused on the hinge.  _ Hel itself is damaged, and he thinks I can - what? Call out a craftsman? _ Under her intent gaze the hinge was losing its rust and discolouration and was turning - moment by moment - a gleaming silver. It wasn’t without a cost to her; she could feel the impact of it in the way her limbs felt heavy and her head was abruptly clouded. It had taken a lot to address such a small thing, and she would have to wait until later to consider the hairline fracture.

Of course, it wasn’t as if the hinge was actually rusted, or that it was even - strictly speaking - a hinge. But there was no metal here, nothing but the bodies of the dead, and so Hela’s seiðr was the hinge, and the bolt, and the sword in Calder’s scabbard, and the mortar which held Hel itself upright.

Oh, there was a contribution from Hel’s denizens, of course - with the protection of Hel around them, they each had seiðr enough to provide themselves with clothing, and to make some small contribution to the inner workings of the city; a table, perhaps, or even a modest dwelling - but that was all confined to the inner fabric of the city. None but Hela herself could make something of the exterior; it would have faded away by dawn if they had tried.

“ It would have been easier to fix if I had been notified the moment there was an issue,” she said, her voice severe. This was not quite true, although the truth was not information she would ever share with anyone. It would make no difference at the end of the day; whether she spent her powers in large doses or in small ones parcelled out across the days, she still spent them. There was no other power source for Hel but Hela; there was no other fabric to build from on Niflheim. And his hesitation concerned her. There was no reason for Calder to delay in notifying her. She was not unreasonable. Why had he done it? And, more importantly, what other problems had been hidden from her sight?

She took her hand away from the hinge and inspected her handiwork. It looked clean and as new as the day she had conjured it, raising the gates and walls and high spokes of the city from the barren ground. She turned to stare at Calder, inspecting him closely. Was it her imagination, or was he… sweating? “Calder,” she started, stepping close, watching him cringe with no small amount of gratification. “A watchman who does not sound the alarm is of no use to me. Why  _ did _ you wait so long before notifying me?”

“ I - I came to you as soon as I saw it, your grace,” he stuttered. He had gone bone white with terror. There were many punishments open to Hela, almost all of them involving a withdrawal - to a small degree, and for a limited time - her protective seiðr from whoever had crossed her. The threat of being exposed to the devouring winds outside - even for a small time, even for a fraction of their strength - had left her with a curiously loyal, devoted populace. Calder’s terror was stark, and true. “There was a new arrival earlier in the day. His… distress… it -” he waved a hand at the crack running through the door. It was infinitesimally small, a shallow thing, as if someone had scored it with a fingernail.

Hela’s gaze followed the sweep of the fracture upwards, beyond the reach of the gate, her eyes widening. She’d thought the damage one of entropy, or perhaps a lapse in her attention. To have it be an outside force… The full import of that flooded her.  _ A seiðr-worker… _ A strong one, if they had been able to impact the shape of her seiðr in such a small amount of time. “Who did this?”

Calder hunched even more. “The - the new arrival, your grace. He -”

“ Bring him to me,” Hela said through clenched teeth.

_ Morons, _ she thought with no small measure of rage. He’d waited until she’d spent herself repairing the gate before revealing that the damage had been deliberate.  _ I shall have to make an example of him, _ she thought. Perhaps a nice ornament for the top of the gate? Or a tree lining the path leading up to it... She would need to have the gate repaired, and they  _ were _ low on wood.

There was more than one way to spend eternity. She would -

“ What is this?” She stared down at the bundle in Calder’s arms.

Calder seemed to have forgotten how to breathe. “The new arrival, your grace.” He thrust the bundle out at her. “An Aesir. And - an Odinson.” He seemed undecided on whether to risk his arms by holding out the child, or his neck, by stepping closer.

“ Odinson,” Hela breathed, staring down at the sleeping child in Calder’s arms. “ _ Him _ ?” The fury of it left her speechless.

She’d known that Odin had sired a successor to her some years ago, of course. A blonde-haired baby borne by one of the Vanir, the new arrivals reported, fairly glowing with pride at the news. A blue-eyed boy to carry on the lie of his legacy where Hela would have been an inconvenient truth.  _ Odin’s get did this to my city? _  He was nothing but a pale imitation of her, an  _ insult _ , a -

The child turned over, blinking pale blue eyes up at her for a moment before he shifted and threw up, with perfect accuracy and impressive projection, all down the front of Calder’s uniform tunic.

“ He sickened,” Calder said weakly, still holding out the child as though he was something venomous. “He succumbed to a childish ailment… that is how he must have come to you, your grace.”

The child made a gurgling noise and squirmed, Calder hastily bringing him back to his chest to avoid dropping him. Making a displeased face at the vomit on the Einherjar’s chest, the child patted the wet spot awkwardly. The vomit vanished.

The door…

Hela glanced up, startled. Was it her imagination, or was the crack on the door… larger?

_ This child is the seiðr-worker? _ she thought, astonished. She could not believe it.  _ Odin has sired a seiðr-worker, and… _ And had not kept a close enough eye on him, letting him come to Hela, his seiðr intact.

She stared down at the sickly child, all tousled brown hair and wide blue eyes. Had it been deliberate, this oversight? Or had Odin truly forgotten what she could do, what a city she’d built with nothing but her own seiðr to power it?

The boy was small and obviously sickly. And yet… even in his sickness and death-throes he had tried to open up the gates of Hel, and had worked strong seiðr to damage them. Hela followed the gentle curve of the child’s cheek with a fingertip, fascinated.  _ What did Odin do to you to make you this powerful, little gift? And what shall I do with you now that you are here?  _ With this one false step by the Allfather, suddenly a world of possibility was open to her.

The child made a soft noise in his almost-slumber and reached for her, utterly fearless. His seiðr was a glittering veil around his soul’s core, young and bright and beguiling. It reached for her as the child did, clinging to her like woodsmoke.  _ What am I to do with you, little Odinson? How did you come to be here?  _

She realised suddenly that they were on display to the whole of the watch, her and her gatekeeper and the small weapon that had been dropped in her lap. Even the ever-present queue of new arrivals had paused to stare.  _ Blast it. _ She couldn’t do this out here. “Bring him,” Hela said abruptly, and turned to walk back to the palace, Calder trailing behind her.

The walk back was through the main thoroughfare, the citizens of Hel falling into a genuflection as Hela passed, Calder almost running behind her to keep pace with her stride.  _ A seiðr-worker, _ she thought again, almost blind to the prostrated bodies on either side of the road.  _ Delivered to my hands by the Norns themselves. And how shall I approach this? _ She would not make the same mistakes again; of that, at least, she was certain. She had rushed ahead precipitously in the past, and had been bound to Niflheim for it. This time, she would know better. She would not act until she knew that victory was guaranteed.

The palace doors swung open at her approach.

Back in the throne room, she settled herself comfortably and held out her arms. “Give him to me.”

The child had woken up fully sometime during the short walk through the city. He did not cry out, the little Odinson, and he did not look frightened. He merely seemed curious, his bright eyes wide as he craned his neck this way and that, trying to see everything, his dark brown hair a tangled mess from squirming in Calder’s arms.

Hela breathed in sharply as the blankets were drawn back. She had assumed that the cloth around the child was another covering Calder had conjured, but this was not so. The little boy was dressed in the clothes he had died in: a child’s nightdress, open at the front for Eir’s attention, no doubt, effortlessly manifested despite his sleep and his death-pains. Despite what he had done to the gate.  _ How did this happen? _ Most new arrivals came to Hel bare and broken, crawling across the landscape to reach the relative safety of the bone gates. How had the child retained enough seiðr to keep both his form and his covering, even after carving into the gates?  _ Where did you come from, little Odinson, to still look like a spoiled prince despite your journey to me? To throw a tantrum and to still retain your form so well? _

The child squirmed some more as Calder handed him over. Once he was in her arms he settled down easily enough, staring up at Hela from his new vantage point with his mouth open. A year old by Asgardian reckoning, she judged, perhaps a little more. Old enough to speak, at any rate. “So,” she said, staring down at him. “You must be Odin’s get.” She frowned. Had she lost track of time, or was she simply misremembering? Wasn’t the new heir supposed to be a bit… older? 

There was something else strange about this little one, something that made her hesitate another beat. He fit the description of the blue-eyed boy, yet somehow there was something imprecise in that, as if she had been fooled with smoke and mirrors. And the flicker of seiðr around the boy’s core wasn’t Aesir, not by a long shot. Who had the old goat taken to marriage-bed to produce him? “What’s your name, infant?”

“ Loki,” the child piped up. His mouth was still hanging half-open as his eyes traced the outline of her battle helmet. He seemed to be mouthing something to himself. Suddenly coming to a decision, he reached out and grabbed a hold of her uniform collar, using it to try to hoist himself up, reaching for the horns of the helmet. Hela’s head jerked back instinctively, eyes widening in surprise as the child stood up in her lap. Once, twice the boy tried, waving a hand and almost unbalancing himself in the process. “Give!” he demanded, growing red-faced with frustration when he couldn’t reach.

Hela caught his hand.  _ Well, he has certainly been raised as an Odinson, if nothing else. Spoiled, pampered… _ Had she been like this when she had been young? It seemed a strange thought. She could not remember all of it, but her earliest memories were of someplace dark, and of the echo of pain. She did not think she had ever been quite this confident that those about her meant her no harm.

Her mouth quirked involuntarily at the petulance in Loki’s voice. “No, I don’t think so. How did you die, Odinson?” That Odin should pay so little attention to his progeny… Well, that did not surprise her, given all that had fallen between them. And this little one was certainly foolhardy enough to have come to a bad end of his own devices, if he was this cavalier with his safety.  _ Vanir, _ she thought scornfully, and yet…  _ no, _ she thought again.  _ No, that’s not quite right. _ The boy looked nothing like the Vanir’s big-boned, blonde beauty, and his seiðr was too strong besides. She paused, looking deeper. The seiðr signature was almost… her lips parted in surprise. No, that could not be correct. And yet the flicker of Jötnar seiðr running through the child’s core could not be explained away. It was inexplicable. Had Odin coupled with a giantess to produce him? All the new arrivals spoke of Odin’s beautiful Vanir queen. None had mentioned a Jötun bride or concubine. How had this come about and been kept quiet?

The child frowned. “I’m not dead!” He said indignantly. “I’m just sick! I’ll… I’ll get better soon!”

“ Will you,” Hela said, and this time she did not fight the smile. “That’s certainly ambitious of you.” She raised an eyebrow at him. “Then tell me, how did you get sick, Odinson?”

The child thought hard on this. “There was a… a...” He stopped, his brow furrowing. “I don’t know,” he said at last, defeated. He sat back down with the air of one exhausted, his limbs sprawling across her knees. “Thor’s sick too,” he mumbled, turning into Hela’s breast, his grip tight on her gauntlet. “Where’s Thor?”

“ Thor,” Hela repeated, flicking a glance at Calder.

“ The… Odin’s firstborn son, your grace,” Calder said, his eyes flickering down to the child. “He was born sometime before the war with the Jötnar. This must be the younger son. Born… later.”

_ Ah. That makes some things clear. _ She smiled, pleased to have had the riddle of the child’s heritage solved.  _ Not so peaceable after all, Odin Borson. _ She hadn’t thought he’d favour the taking of child hostages - he certainly had not shown the patience for it in the past - but perhaps this was part of his so-called turn to peace. Although…  _ you’re supposed to raise him alongside your sons, Odin, _ she thought, a hand smoothing down the child’s dark hair.  _ Not make him one of them. _

Perhaps Odin had not yet abandoned his instincts for battle, and the child’s seiðr had appealed to him as a weapon.

Yet there were ways to control that without making a son of him.  _ Sentiment, _ she snorted. Perhaps there had been no rational thought behind it, and Odin had grown weaker and more foolish than even she had supposed.

The child tugged at her urgently. “Where’s Thor?” he asked again, staring up at her. He seemed more inconvenienced than afraid to be sat in a stranger’s lap. Who did he think she was? One of his father’s guards? A - she could barely contain the laugh - nursemaid?

“ He’s not here yet, Odinson,” she said. She settled him back down easily, the child strangely cooperative. “Do you think he’ll follow you?”

He nodded. “He wouldn’t leave me on my own.” He said it with the easy confidence of the very young, for whom many things are immutable.

_ Interesting. _ Was the elder child struggling his way across the horizon even this moment?

She grew briefly distracted as she cast her seiðr across the Niflheim landscape, looking across the ragged train of the new arrivals that made its way perpetually east towards the gates of Hel. There were certainly plenty of infants in the procession, but none jumped out at her as especially powerful. Although she supposed that Odin’s natural-born son could have been born weak and useless. That might explain why the old goat had stolen another’s child. (She half-hoped that was the case for the humiliation it would bring to Odin, and half-knew it could not be. He had managed to produce  _ her _ , after all. For all his flaws and weaknesses, a lack of power had never been one of them.)

“ And father,” the boy piped up, unbidden. “And mother.”

“ No?”

His nose wrinkled. “Of course not.” He yawned, rubbing at his eyes with a chubby fist. There were fever tear-marks on his cheeks, raised proud like welts or Jötun scars. “When will they get here?”

“ Not just yet,” Hela said. “Soon.” She was silent for a moment, thinking. The child’s distress had cast his seiðr against hers, and though he was yet small and weak, he had damaged the gates in his panic.  _ What could he do if directed?  _ Should she destroy the child now, or was there a way that would bring her a greater victory? 

At a loss as to what else to say, she found herself murmuring, “I’ll look after you in the meantime, child,” almost sincerely, her mind considering the possibilities. She hesitated a fraction. “I’m your sister, Hela.”

“ Hela,” the child repeated dutifully. He yawned again, the windows of the throne room seeming to tremble with the force of it. “I didn’t know I had a sister,” he mumbled and slumped down, searching for a comfortable position to curl up in. He did not seem perturbed by either this new knowledge or his previous ignorance.

Hela stared at him for a long moment, nonplussed.  _ I didn’t know I had a sister. _ Said so artlessly, so guilelessly, that it had taken her a moment to understand it. Had Odin said  _ nothing _ of her? That made no sense. How had he explained the murals and frescoes? How had he explained the monuments? Had he cast her as a stranger?

She’d known that he would likely gloss over the truth of his wars, but to not even mention her to his sons?

_ Perhaps he is too young, _ she thought and there was a strange desperation to it, as if something inside her could not bear to think of the alternative.  _ That must be it. Odin must be waiting until he’s a bit older and can understand. _ And yet to leave him so defenceless seemed a barren kind of mercy. Surely it would have been better for him to know who his enemy was, and who would await him when he passed over?

“ You can go now, Calder,” she said, her voice quiet. She did not stir from her careful stillness atop the throne of gilded skulls, the child drowsy in her arms.

Calder bowed deeply and withdrew, casting a last fearful glance at the windows high above the throne room. They had not stopped trembling in the wake of the child’s disquiet, the light from them glowing brighter.

The throne room was quiet. Hela looked up at the windows and squinted, willing them into stillness. They acquiesced after a moment, but - although it did not take a lot of power - it still took  _ some _ , and she noted this. The child, then. Half-asleep, no longer distressed, and trusting her at her word that she meant him no harm, and yet the windows shook as he did. 

_ That’s not my seiðr, _ she realised at last, and the thought woke her from her almost-stupor. The Norns take Odin and his machinations! She’d been so distracted by it all that she’d stopped thinking. The child wasn’t working her own seiðr against her, using his own meager stores to do so; no, he was working his  _ own.  _ He had enough seiðr in him to challenge hers.  _ He’s a Norn-damned seiðr-source!  _ He wasn’t wearing Odin’s Aesir glamour, he was changing through his own protective colouring. He was powering it through death and distress, and had managed to cause enough disruption and damage to the gates for Calder to call her out to fix them. All this, in a few short hours, when most freshly-dead Aesir were still on their knees in the dirt, begging her for succour. 

No wonder the hinges had rusted. She stared down at the boy, astonished. 

She had not thought Odin capable of a mistake as deep as  _ this _ . Those who were a wellspring of seiðr were not a resource one discarded lightly, if at all. Odin was one himself, of course, as was Hela, and there had been a handful of others before her banishment. Even fewer afterwards. Hela herself had fought wars to secure the brightest and strongest sources for her army, and yet here was one literally dropped in her lap, after centuries of drought. 

The child didn’t seem to have anything to say about any of this. He’d curled up quite happily in her lap, his head pillowed against the crook of her arm, one small hand holding on to the edge of her gauntlet. He seemed content to rest in her arms, completely oblivious to the danger he was in.

_ A seiðr-source... _

She could snuff him out of existence, she knew. He was strong, yes, but still young and fragile. She could burn out the thin, fragile essence of him until nothing but the memory of ash remained. Or she could change him, transfigure him into a tree or a rock or some creature and leave him as a fixture on the barren landscape of Niflheim. She thought about looking out across the black and red sky of Hel and seeing in the distance the blasted, charred remains of Odin’s son, reaching up into the sky in a rictus of pain and despair, his seiðr slaved to hers. The idea had a certain charm.

Perhaps she could use the wood to make the hilt of her swords. A tree made of an Aesir - or even one made of a Jötun - could yield an infinity of such implements, and the seiðr in him would make her knives even more potent. Or perhaps she could simply use him as a well-spring for the core of Hel, and add his power to her own. All she’d need to do would be to consume him, and that was easily accomplished, if a trifle ghoulish. She could -

She did not know how long she sat there, contemplating her options, almost staggered at the avenues suddenly open to her.  _ I knew he could make mistakes… but one such as this? _ It was almost unthinkable. She could almost imagine the panic in Asgard as they realised their preciously-guarded seiðr source had slipped between their fingers, and ended up in hers. Odin would… what? Execute those who had failed in safeguarding the child? Approach the Norns directly to attempt to claw him back? Or perhaps he would simply write him off as lost, as he had done to her, all those long years ago. Perhaps even now he was scouring the length and breadth of Yggdrasil, looking for another infant to snatch up.

_ What havoc you have wreaked, little one, without lifting a finger. _ She reached out a hand to him, then stopped. What should she do? Consume him? Slave him to her? Make a permanent display of his body so that all in Hel knew her power? Or simply throw the boy outside and let the winds devour him?

She had still not reached a decision when the child stirred a short while later, blinking up at her. His small, babyish hand closed over hers, as if she’d been reaching to soothe rather than harm, gripping her fingers tightly. His other hand was still clasped over one of the spurs of her gauntlet.

There was something… wrong… with his eyes. She could have sworn that he’d been blue-eyed when he’d been brought in. Hadn’t she thought that? Perhaps it was the seiðr again, playing tricks on her. But… she could have sworn… Odin’s blue-eyed boy…

“ I’m tired,” the boy, Loki, complained, and tugged on her hand as if she was there for his convenience. He blinked wetly, his cheeks still ruddy with fever, his little body loose-limbed in her arms. “Hela, when is Thor coming, I’m  _ tired. _ ”

“ Then sleep,” Hela said through numb lips.  _ His eyes, _ she thought, and her grip tightened around him. “If you are tired, you should sleep, Loki.”

He peered up at her. “And you’ll keep watch?”

She was silent for long enough to make his forehead crease with alarm. “Yes,” she said. “I’ll keep watch.”

He nodded seriously at this, squirming in her lap to get comfortable. He closed those bright green eyes and made a soft huffing noise as he dropped suddenly into sleep, as quickly and as trustingly as if she had borne him herself. His soft-sweet smell was the smell of all small children, still milk-wet and trusting, his dark lashes fanning out across his rosy cheeks as breathed low and deep in her arms.

The child weighed almost nothing, she thought clinically, her grip tightening around him. Not much substance to him at all. Maybe he had a year, perhaps a little more, but that sort of youth was not enough to contain the power the child had. If she did turn him into a tree - if she did decide to use him as nothing more than kindling - then he wouldn’t make much of one. A sapling, if that. His seiðr would be burnt away to nothing in a short space of time, and would yield nothing but a good knife, maybe two, if she was lucky. He was too young to sustain more than that; even in tree-form, his limbs would soon wither and break, and he’d fade away into dust on the Niflheim plain.

She’d have a revenge of sorts against Odin in such an act, it was true. His beloved son, his precious seiðr-source, turned to nothing more than raw materials in the bowels of Hel. But in this revenge he would also be relieved, for she would not have made the best use out of the child and the weapon within him. She would have squandered the opportunity for a short-term pleasure in Odin’s - and the child’s - suffering.

But -  _ if he were older… _

Unbidden, the thought of an older Loki crowded her thoughts. Those same strange eyes, that same certainty in what the universe owed him, his seiðr in full bloom…

Her eyes flickered to the tremor creeping back into the windows then back to the child in her arms. Loki’s hair looked almost black in the brightness of the dawn.

_ A few more years, and his seiðr will grow more useful. _ If he was fully grown when he came to her… There was always the risk that he’d die in battle, but somehow she doubted that he was destined for Valhalla. Not this one, and not if she laid prior claim to him. Not if she marked him as  _ hers. _

She did not have to rush into a decision just yet. She could let him go - for a time - and watch what might happen as a result. At worst, he’d be a source of entertainment. At best, he’d be an ally in Odin’s court when she broke free and took the throne.

Either way, he would come to her in the fullness of his power.

And what might she do with seiðr almost as strong as hers? If she could break free of Niflheim and return to Asgard, Loki at her side or no, what would be denied her? 

There was something else that appealed to her, a low, deep need, although she hesitated to name it for it seemed to her a vulnerability she could ill-afford. And yet it would not leave her, worming into her as a poison might, settling into the marrow of her bones.  _ A shapeshifter _ , and felt a stab of deep, cruel satisfaction at the thought. Perhaps Hela’s weakness was Odin, but - though there was shame in that - she was not alone in that lapse. Odin should have kept the child as a hostage, not a son, but he had never been as wise as he’d pretended. He’d left his heart open for the perfect knife:

A little Jötun baby, with her pale green eyes and black hair, sleeping in a crib beside the Allfather’s bed; a living, breathing reminder of her, cradled to his chest.

_ You can choose to cast me out, Father. But the child you embrace and dote upon will be as I once was. I wonder how well your heart will take that reminder when my blade slides home? _

No, it would cost her little to let the boy go. He was a comely child, well-formed and charming. He would likely grow into a formidable ally, if his gifts held true.

_ An investment, then. A thought for the future. _ And when Odin’s power over her weakened, and she broke free of Niflheim and of Hel...

She looked down at the child asleep in her lap, one small hand clasped in hers, her other hand cradling his head. Without volition, her fingers started to card through his hair.


	2. Chapter 2

The boy lasted five centuries - almost to adulthood - before he returned to Hel.

In retrospect, perhaps Hela should have expected this. Loki had been utterly devoid of fear when curled up in her arms, so it stood to reason that his judgement was somehow impaired enough to make survival to adulthood unlikely.

Or perhaps it had been the fault of his elder brother; yes, she could well believe  _ that _ . Tales of Thor’s exploits had reached her steadily with every new arrival. The Odinson fought  _ this _ monster, and subdued  _ that _ world, and triumphed in  _ that _ battle; if you went on the strength of the tales you would think him a battle-hardened prince burdened with the sole defence of Asgard, rather than the reality of a youth still not old enough to be anything other than his father’s standard-bearer.

Of Loki, she heard little. For all his fearlessness the prince was reportedly quiet, introspective. Happy - ha! - to live in Thor’s shadow, like some kind of plant or gentle creature. Still tied to his mother’s skirts - Frigga, if Hela had followed that correctly - and far too fond of women’s arts. A seiðr-worker, the whispers went, and they were awed, mistrustful… and a little scornful. For was not seiðr-work women’s work?

That was a feeling that Hela understood all too well, despite it being a relatively new thing to the Aesir. It made a certain amount of sense: since he could not contain the seiðr of his people, Odin had made it so that they would contain it themselves, channeling it to healing and scrying, and whittling it away from his Einherjar with his disdain.  _ So that is how you keep order, Borson. Clever. _ And yet the boy had not relinquished his seiðr, embracing it despite the mockery and mistrust it must have brought down on his head.

To his credit, Calder did not hesitate a second time to bring Loki to her attention. Instead he marched him without a word to her throne room, kicking the boy’s knees out so he sprawled at her feet. The boy’s arms were bound behind his back but he looked unharmed other than that. He had - as before - retained the clothes he had died in. This outfit was a little more elaborate than the infant’s nightdress he had worn before, although not by much. Plain black cloth, accented with green.

Her colours, on the young prince of Asgard. On an  _ Odinson. _ It made her mouth a little dry to look at him, to see in him her future as queen. An Asgard draped in her colours, with her banners from its tallest towers, and her standard borne into battle by the Einherjar. There was a strange pain in her chest, a clenching, cramping agony of  _ want _ as she stared at the boy and remembered who she was and what had been taken from her. She had to look away to contain it, blinking away the memory and striving for composure.  _ That should have been mine. I should be there now, Odin slain and my brothers kneeling at my feet. _ And instead...

“ Loki Odinson, your grace,” Calder announced, and took a respectful step back.

“ Loki,” Hela breathed. The advisors flanking her hastily gathered up the vellum scrolls at her side and stepped back as Hela swept down from her throne, her hair loose about her shoulders.

The boy climbed back to his feet, glaring daggers at Calder, at Hela, at everyone in the throne room. He was still several inches shy of six foot in his stockinged feet, his face soft as a girl’s, green eyes flashing dangerously. Hela stopped in front of him, striving for calm insouciance with a hand on her hip. She was tempted to reach inside the boy and check the growth of his seiðr, as a cook checks the bake of bread by sliding a knife into its soft insides.  _ Not yet. _ “Do you remember me, little one?” she asked, her mouth curving into a smile, and reached out a hand to touch one of his green-ribboned braids.

He stared up at her, furious and fluffed up as a cat. He was practically up on his tiptoes in his efforts to appear large and threatening. “Should I?”

Hela pursed her lips at that, startled. Well, alright. Maybe she’d been unduly optimistic to think that he’d retain any memories of Hel after she’d thrown him bodily back into life; he’d been barely more than an infant. But surely he couldn’t have lost  _ all _ of it? Frankly, she’d been hoping that little Loki might develop enough of a backbone during his sojourn on Asgard to send Thor down to her instead. Now,  _ him _ she could hold on to with no qualms.

Not that she had qualms about holding on to Loki, of course. He’d been stupid enough to die once, and it had cost her dearly to intervene.

And yet… he wore black and green, did he not? He had taken on her colours as an infant, and had grown to - almost - adulthood clothed thus. He could not have forgotten  _ all _ of it.

Without a word, she swept her hands over her face and allowed her helmet to form, the horns gleaming pitch black. Her advisors - cowards, all of them - inched away. “How about now, Odinson?”

Something flickered in his eyes. Recognition? “I…” he hesitated. “I had a fever-dream, once. As a child. There was someone who…” his voice trailed off, pinkness melting across his cheeks and mouth.

_ Ah, youth. _ She smiled. “Yes,” she said, voice low. “I see you remember.” She cast her eyes over him, looking for the wound that would have sent him to her. “And yet, for all that, you are here. And still too small for my uses.”

The flush grew deep and ruddy in his indignation. The boy drew himself up to his full height, glowering. “I am not here for your use,” he said. His voice had the high pitch of hysteria, of lost toys and of the death-blow sighted. “I demand that you release me. My father will -”

“ Your father,” Hela said, still in that same menacing voice, “was careless enough to lose you twice to my care. And I do not let my toys go easily.” Her gaze slid up from that lovely plush mouth, over the sharp jut of his cheekbones to his wide green eyes.  _ Such a pretty child. _ It helped, of course, that he’d modelled himself on her; it soothed her vanity to think that she’d made such an impression on him. And what had Odin made of it all, to see his youngest wandering about with her eyes and hair? How had he reacted to see the boy recover  _ thus _ from his infant’s fever?

Loki swallowed, his throat working. He looked desperately about the hall, as if seeking an ally. Whatever he saw did not seem to soothe him. At last, his eyes settled back on Hela, glancing up at the horns of her helmet before falling, helpless, to her mouth. “What do you want?” he asked at last, his voice trembling. He seemed to understand, finally, that there were no allies here.

Still. There was  _ something _ not quite right with that. He was being a little too frightened; yielding a little too easily. Surely the boy she had seen before would not do so? Unless...

Hela reached with her seiðr, narrowing her eyes. “That was foolish,” she said, half-amusement and half-exasperation in her voice.  _ That’s more like it. _ The copy of the boy - all trembling limbs and wet eyes - faded into nothingness and the real boy shimmered into view a few steps away, clearly in the process of inching out of the throne room. He might have been successful, had Hela been anyone other than herself.

“ Did you really think to use your seiðr on  _ me _ , little brother?” She knocked him down onto his back, watching with amusement as he attempted - and failed - to break his fall with his bound hands. His legs splayed ungracefully and his hair mussed, the faint scent of seiðr fire still clinging to him, he made a pretty picture. She gave in to temptation and slid to the floor, crawling over him so she had a leg on either side of his hips, her arms bracketing his head. Loki’s eyes widened and he reared back sharply enough to smack his head into the stone floor with a heavy, wet sound.  _ Ah, so that’s where the wound is. What happened to you, little one? _

Hela slid a hand into the mass of black hair, her fingers finding the tell-tale wetness of blood and brain matter. “I sent you back before,” she murmured, her whisper ghosting over those lovely plush lips. She settled herself firmly in his lap and felt him shudder.  _ Lovely, _ she thought, pleased, and took advantage of his distraction to probe her fingers into the wound on the back of his head. “That’s a mortal wound, little Odinson. Did you learn nothing from your last sojourn in Hel?” She trailed her lips over the edge of his jaw, the skin soft and cool beneath her lips. “Or were you so eager to come back to my arms that you let what little brains you possess be smashed against the palace flagstones?” She closed her teeth gently over the edge of an earlobe.

Loki shuddered. “It was actually my bedroom wall,” he managed. His voice cracked on the last word, a mortified flush high up in his cheeks and melting all the way down his neck, disappearing into the collar of his tunic.

_ How lovely he is. _ A comely infant, and a comely child. It was a shame he’d managed to get himself killed so early, when he was still too young to be of much use to her.

She pulled back, seating herself more firmly in his lap and watching him squirm to get away. “None of that,” she said, and the ropes around his wrists snaked across the rest of him, rooting him to the ground. She glanced up at Calder and the two advisors who were still frozen near the hall door, waiting to be dismissed. “You may go,” she said. “I have no need of you at the moment.”

“ Wait!” The boy cried out, twisting as best he could. His eyes sought Calder’s. “You can’t leave me here! You know who I am, what I can do. If you know me, you know I can help you escape from here!”

_ Oh, you clever boy. _ He may not have remembered Calder, but he’d figured out that the Einherjar remembered  _ him _ . He must have been trying to make a pitch for Calder’s cooperation the entire way through Hel. No wonder Calder had dumped him so unceremoniously on Hela’s doorstep; he would not have wanted even the suspicion of disloyalty to hang about him.

Smiling a little, Hela put a hand over the boy’s mouth rather than restrain him another way, watching him tremble at the contact. “None of that,” she admonished. Her gaze flickered up to Calder, who had still not left. He was staring down at the boy, a terrible hunger in his eyes.  _ The seiðr-fire,  _ Hela realised.  _ He must be still be able to sense it on him. _ “Now, Calder,” she said. “I have family matters to attend to.”

That seemed to wake him from his frozen pose. “Your grace,” Calder managed, and backed out.

The doors made an ominously loud sound as they closed behind him.

After a moment, Loki ceased in his struggles and lay limply beneath her, his eyes defiant.

“ Will you be obedient, or must I restrain you?”

Loki rolled his eyes at that and Hela could not suppress the startled laugh that bubbled out of her at the sight. “A foolish question, I see.” She took her hand away and Loki remained quiet and still, watching her from beneath his lashes.  _ Such a pretty child, _ she thought again, and felt a pang of frustration that he hadn’t managed to hang on to life just that little bit longer. His seiðr was still half-formed and there was a tell-tale thread of someone else’s power wound tight about him, someone who -  _ ah. Frigga, of course. _ She would have been the one to hold Loki’s hand and take him down into the teaching halls, where he could practice his skills without fear or censure. She would have been the one to fold his babyish fingers into their first forms, and sound out the incantations for him until he could subvocalise them for the same effect.  _ Like a mother, teaching a child to read, _ and there was an ugly pang of something beneath her sternum, as if Frigga had reached into her chest and taken something she should not. Something which belonged to Hela.

She sat back, making herself comfortable in Loki’s lap. The boy’s eyes narrowed but he did not struggle this time, nor have any other reaction. That last was a bit surprising. Hadn’t he -  _ ah, _ she felt it now, the thread of seiðr that he had wrought upon his own body to keep himself quiescent when he willed it. A useful thing, when he was at an age to have his body rebel against him. She would have no amusement at his humiliation unless she acted deliberately - and she found she did not have the stomach for that.

Sighing, she stood up and dusted herself off. “Come on, then, brother.” She offered him a hand up. “Let me see how you have joined my court.”

Cautiously, Loki climbed to his feet. “I have not done any such thing,” he said, his gaze wary. “I have merely -”

“ \- killed yourself in a fairly humiliating demonstration of your limits, yes, I can see. Tell me, does the Allmother not have tutors keeping an eye on you, or are you allowed to run as wild as that oafish brother of yours?”

The boy clenched his fists. “Careful of your words, witch,” he spat. “I will not hear such things against my mother!”

_ Well, then. _ “But my observation of your brother was true and did not prompt a denial, I see.”

Loki flushed a beet red but did not gainsay her. “It isn’t  _ fair _ ,” he said instead, full of childish venom. “He gets to train on his own and he’s not even that much older!”

Hela’s smile widened. “Ah. And your tutors would not allow you the same liberty.” She reached out and took his hand in hers.  _ Such a lovely boy, _ she thought again.  _ So very, very angry. _

“ He gets to do  _ everything _ ,” Loki said, almost inaudible. “He’s not even very good at swordwork yet, and he…” he trailed off, face flushing again.

_ Ah. _ The boy had clearly been shown what was and was not of value in Odin’s realm, and though the old king might have gazed hungrily on the power Loki held, he would not have encouraged it. Not when he could praise Thor instead, so unlike Hela - and Loki - in every respect. The rest of the court would of course have followed Odin’s lead. “Those who do not understand seiðr-work often undervalue it,” Hela said softly. She could guess how it had gone: Thor, flush with triumph over his liberty, mocking the younger boy for still being subject to supervision.  _ As if the risk is comparable, _ she though, scornful. Eir could have healed the young brute from almost any wound; the injuries Loki had sustained had been instantly fatal, and without recourse.

She could see the faint echo of the boy’s seiðr and how he had tried to manipulate it to suit his own purposes. He was still too young to do so correctly, of course, and it must have caused the accident. Likely it was his use of the seiðr that had made the wound mortal - he would have survived a similar blow had it come merely from a weapon - but that was a blessing in disguise. What seiðr could do, it could also undo, at least in the malleability of Hel. It would be a relatively simple thing to correct his premature death, and to send him back to be angry and resentful of his over-privileged elder brother.

Her logic from his first death held true: the boy was more useful to her deployed in Odin’s court. At least for the time being, and with the right encouragement, of course.

The thing about younger siblings, Hela had decided long ago, was that they had a very obvious handle. All you had to do was look at  _ them _ , and not their elders, and they would be eating out of the palm of your hand. It was why Hela herself had been glad to be an only child, and to not have to worry about some pathetic would-be usurper allying herself with Hela’s enemies out of jealousy. Things hadn’t worked out there; Thor doubtless had the self-confidence and grace of the firstborn, though he was a younger son.

Of course, that meant that he’d fall even more spectacularly when Loki turned away from him. That was the way of things: inevitable, and inexorable.

“ Loki,” she began, folding an arm about him and drawing him close to her, “we didn’t really get to know each other the last time you were here. You were mostly dead, and also an infant, and I didn’t really get a sense of anything from you other than wanting to be held.” Loki’s colour deepened to a dull flush and he looked away. “But now you’ve grown,” Hela murmured, pitching her voice low. She had to bend down a little to whisper in his ear, and she felt him shiver against her as she did so. “And I want to know about you, darling brother. I want to know  _ all about you. _ ”

Loki looked up at her, his gaze clouded by suspicion and hope in equal measure. Had anyone other than Frigga paid him any attention? Or had Odin and his court left him unattended to wander back into her realm, his heart open and ready for whatever she within to pour within in? “Do you mean to keep me here?”

Hela stroked a hand through his hair, smiling as she felt him tense.  _ So responsive. _ If she played this right, the next time he joined her, he might have already dispatched Thor. “I haven’t decided yet. Now.” She sat back down in her throne, and gestured to the top step of the dais. “Why don’t you have a seat and tell me all about your schooling, hmmm?”

Loki glanced about the room one last time, as if seeking an exit. Not seeing an obvious one, he nodded reluctantly and sat down at her feet, biting his lip. His upturned gaze was the clear pale green of Hela’s seiðr. With his spill of dark hair and coltish young limbs, he was a mirror of her at that age, young and fresh and unspoiled as virgin clay. “What do you want to know?”

Hela smiled.


	3. Chapter 3

Things were quiet in the centuries that followed. Change came slowly to Hel, brought by the slow, steady trickle of souls that arrived each day. Occasionally, entire worlds would arrive, families clutching at each other in their terror, more often than not bewildered and uncomprehending of what had befallen them. Hel had space for them all of course - such was its nature, and Hela had been careful in how she had created it, letting each new denizen draw no more from Hel than they contributed - but the sudden growth of the city was not a pleasant thing. The new arrivals were panicked and starving, leaking blood and entrails from their wounds until they learned to put their forms back together. The smell of mortality hung heavy about them for months, for  _ years _ , and their neighbours had to work all the harder to hold the fabric of Hel together while they settled in.

Once, during a particularly strong influx - via a supernova that had taken out two planetary systems and had sent eighteen billion souls to Hel’s gates - Hela had taken the unprecedented step of delaying admittance. This went against the custom that the queue to gain entry was both endless and infinitesimal, the paradox sustained easily through Hela’s will. Hel would still welcome all who came to seek shelter within, but the queue was no longer as swift, and those who wished admittance spent several cold nights camped outside the city gates until they could gain entrance.

It was hard on them. Several thousand of the more fragile souls had undoubtedly been lost during that time, exposed as they had been to the harsh winds of Niflheim, but there had been little choice if Hel was to be preserved. Luckily, such floods were blessedly rare.

Until, one day, for no reason at all, they were not.

*

“ The Mad Titan,” Hela repeated. She was on the western battlements, watching the winding queue wrapped around the walls of the city. Twelve billion more souls had just arrived on top of the usual daily trickle and they had not yet finished processing the backlog from the last great influx. “But if he is slaughtering them in battle, why do they come here?” Surely - if they had died an honourable death fighting the Titan - these poor wretches should have been bound for Valhalla and not Hela’s tender mercies.

Beside her, Calder shifted uncomfortably. It appeared that the thought had occurred to him as well. “They are not warriors, your grace.” He pointed a hand towards a tangle of what could only be described as tentacles, waiting patiently behind a small group of infant Kree tended by a Ba-Bani trader. “The elder I spoke to said that the Titan had not come to conquer, or to enslave. He had come to butcher, and so he and his monstrous children cut their way through the populace as one would cull a herd. One half were spared.”

_ And one half sent to me, _ and there was a pang of something strange and coppery at that thought, as if the mere idea of it was enough to draw blood. Twelve billion souls, killed as cattle.

Hela would have understood a need for conquest, or a slaughter simply for the joy of it. Once upon a time, she had been the one to fell entire worlds and to sweep their denizens into Niflheim, the one whose name was whispered among the stars, the one whose name inspired nightmares. Yet the Titan seemed to take no joy in the deaths he brought about. Instead he played at battle and sought to swell the ranks of her disciples not through conquest but through  _ mathematics _ . Half to die, for all to live; what  _ utter dross _ . It was worse than the most pretentious of Odin’s speeches and self-justifications.

She rather thought that she’d be less put out if the bastard had just owned his bloodthirst and confined himself to arbitrarily cutting a swathe through the galaxy. Certainly it would have sent at least a portion of those butchered to Valhalla’s gates rather than hers. But  _ this _ .  _ Half _ of a world, not a whole world.  _ Half _ of a people, not a whole people.  _ The last of the Titans is an insane gardener. _ No, it would not do at all.

“ Add in another day’s lag.” She barely glanced at Calder as she swept away. “And find me someone useful to question!”

*

That someone presented themselves a bare decade later, bloodied and bruised and looking somewhat bemused as he was marched inside.

“ So. It is true. He means to accelerate.”

Loki stared up at her, still bleeding sluggishly from the wound spilling his entrails into his cupped hands. He had a vaguely stunned look on his face. “ _ You, _ ” he breathed, poleaxed. “I  _ know _ you!”

Hela rolled her eyes. “Yes, I’ve brought you back to life twice. I’d imagine that would be at least a little memorable, even if the particulars of it escape you when back among the living. Tell me, brother,” she squatted beside him and poked a curious finger at the gaping wound in his abdomen, “how is it that you just can’t seem to stay out of Hel? I send you back, and within a few centuries you end up back here. If I didn’t know any better, I’d wonder if you missed me.”

Her brother - grown to adulthood, at last, and as beautiful as she had anticipated - was too busy gaping to answer. Finally, he swallowed. “I thought I had dreamt you,” he murmured, almost too low to hear. “The first time, and then… then the second.”

“ And now the third,” Hela said back. She had not removed her hand from his abdomen. “This is not a mortal wound, brother. Painful, yes. But there is no seiðr in it, and Eir should have been able to heal you easily. Why are you here?”

Loki’s expression grew shuttered and he jerked back from her touch. “There is magic other than seiðr, s- Hela. Surely you knew that?”

“ Mmmm.” She did not comment on his brief stumble, but sat back on her haunches and watched him try and fail to climb to his feet. She had been right: the wound was not mortal. It was, however, debilitating. “None that the Mad Titan has at his disposal. He does his killing the old-fashioned way. And yet Calder tells me that you were in the flood from Ba-Bani, a world decidedly  _ not _ part of the Nine Realms, nor in any way affiliated with Asgard.” Loki would not meet her eyes. “And so I have to wonder,” she continued in that same soft voice, “what would bring you to Ba-Bani, brother. And what would give you this -” she reached out and pressed her hand over his, slippery with his blood, “and send you to me from a seiðr poison.”

Instead of answering, Loki shuffled backwards, putting some distance between them, and tried to get to his feet. He was no more successful than he had been the previous time, his knees giving way.

Hela watched him struggle for a long moment. Then, “there is a trick to it,” she said, and sent a tendril of seiðr deep into his guts, folding them in for him as if smoothing down unruly hair. She stitched over the wound loosely, and set the skin to knitting itself together.

Loki stared down at his abdomen, his expression one of unpleasant surprise. “It wouldn’t work when I tried it.”

“ No, well. You’re using a lot of seiðr to keep your form as it is, and you also did yourself quite the injury when you - hmmmm. What was it?” She reached out with her still-bloody hand and turned his chin this way and that, looking for the tell of it in his eyes. “Ah, I see. Clever, delicate work, brother. As neat as any tapestry.” His brain was riddled with clots, burst one after the other. It must have taken an enormous amount of power to both generate them and rupture them sufficiently quickly to avoid merely crippling himself. “Who were you trying to escape?”

He was silent for another moment, stock-still in her hands. Finally, his shoulders sagged, his mouth trembling. “Thanos has many children,” he said, and there was a quiet kind of horror in his voice. “I came to them by chance, not design. I was betrayed, you see. By Thor, by Odin. By all of Asgard. Remaining after all my bridges had been burnt did not seem a way that was open to me.” He was silent for a long moment, his expression shuttered. “I… misjudged. Would that Thanos had not found me, and that the Void had taken me instead.”

Hela did not look away from those clear green eyes, so much like her own. Betrayal, she could work with. “And so, you chose the path back to me, not knowing that is where it led.”

“ I did,” he agreed easily. “But…” he hesitated, and suddenly his cheeks pinked. “I knew that I did not fear it.”

“ No,” Hela said, a strange feeling deep in her belly. He had fled Thor… for  _ her. _ She rubbed her thumb across his lower lip, smearing it with blood. “No, you did not.”

*

It took him another day to heal fully. Hela came back to her bedchamber to find him cross-legged, seiðr-fire flaring to life around him.

“ Experimenting?” She asked, amused. He hadn’t caused any damage to the gates this time, at least, his seiðr almost spent on his death-magic.

He looked up at her from beneath his lashes, suddenly fey. “Exploring. This realm is… vast.”

“ It needs to be.” Hela peeled off her helmet and let loose her hair, letting the braids down. Her armour was already unlacing itself as she sat on the edge of the bed, watching him finish up.

He stood up, dusting himself off, and came to sit beside her. “I was surprised at the bedchamber,” he said after a moment. “I somehow did not imagine amenities in the afterlife.”

Hela smiled at this. “Well. There weren’t any to begin with. But a queen needs a palace, after all.” It had not been a luxury, not even in those first years when she had been little more than the other new arrivals. It had been her seiðr that had set her apart from the others; her seiðr and the fact that the winds did not seem to eat at her as they ate at everyone else. Perhaps that protection came from inside her, or perhaps Odin had thought to install it when he’d imprisoned her here; it mattered little. Just because she did not fade did not mean that she could not suffer. She had raised her palace as a stronghold first and as a seat of power second, and it was strong enough to resist even Odin himself, should he ever be foolish enough to come to her.

“ And a king.” Loki’s shoulders were tight. “Or, that is what I thought. I was… mistaken.” He took a deep breath. “I was to rule,” he said, fast and deep, as if lancing a wound. “I  _ was _ ruling, until Thor and his friends turned to treason, out of  _ spite _ . And yet their defiance is forgiven and Thor roams Yggdrasil to find new monsters to fight, while my birthright is denied me.” There was a world of hurt in his voice and a deep bewilderment. It was the sound of a child who could not understand why they had suddenly been denied something they had always assumed would be constant. 

But what was driving his sense of betrayal? Surely not that he did not sit upon the throne? He had been raised a second son; even if Hela’s claim did not precede Thor’s, Loki would have never been raised to presume upon such a strange arrangement that  _ he  _ would rule instead.

“ Your birthright?” Hela arched an eyebrow. “You were not born to sit on Asgard’s throne, brother. Even less so than Thor.” The throne was hers, and Thor a usurper as much as Loki would have been.

Loki, who was flushed still with anger and betrayal. He turned to her, eyes blazing. “In what way?” he demanded. “In what way was I less worthy than Thor, who was an arrogant, thoughtless -” He bit off the rest of his sentence, eyes wide, recoiling from her as if she had struck him. “You know,” he whispered.

_ Ah. There it is. _ There was the source of his rage. The little boy who had never quite fit in, who had played at women’s arts and been scorned for it, who had looked to his family for - what? Surely not affirmation? Or did he have even less sense in who to trust then she had originally supposed? Had the foolish boy placed his trust in Odin? In  _ Thor? _

No wonder he looked ready to fly from her as well.

Hela said nothing for a moment, then shifted so that she was facing him, one knee drawn up on the bed. She reached out and buried a hand in his hair, tugging him close. “I know,” she said simply. She held tight when he tried to jerk away, betrayal in his eyes. “I knew you for a Jötun and a seiðr-source the moment you came to me, barely a year old and so utterly fearless that you fell asleep in my arms. And I knew that Odin would not tell you.” She leaned in, her other hand going to his knee for balance. “That’s what he does, brother,” she breathed into his ear, and watched his pulse jump in his neck. “He collects power. He steals it, and then claims it came from him. Surely you knew this?” The old man had sorely misjudged in setting Loki upon the throne, she thought, however temporarily. He was not suited for it, and it made him all the more resentful to have that taken away. Better to have found a worthy place for the boy, and lavished him with all the attention and fripperies he so clearly desired.

And yet… even if Thor had wrestled the throne from Loki’s grasp, however temporarily, it still did not explain what Loki had been doing in the Void, why he had come to her thus. Had Odin decided to finally erase this memento mori through force? Was that how Loki had ended up lost in the Void, prey to the Titan’s devouring children?

“ Loki,” she murmured, and slid her hand upwards.

Slowly, hesitantly, Loki’s hand covered hers, stilling the movement. “No. No, I didn’t know. He told me… but it was all lies. He would never have let me rule, even if Thor had died on Midgard.” His fingers were pale and cool over hers, stroking slowly. He turned her hand over and traced the lines in her palm with a fingertip, mapping her lifeline. “One lie after the other. And so… I let go. I couldn’t stay and watch him - watch  _ Thor _ \- lie to me again. Falling into the Void was preferable to hearing him say the words.” He raised her hand to his mouth, pressing his lips to her palm in an almost-kiss. “I wish I’d killed him. I wish I’d killed them both.” It was almost inaudible.

_ The Void… _ He had practically had himself delivered to Thanos on a silver platter, the idiot boy. And for what? Odin’s lie, yes, but… there had been that small hesitation, that infinitesimal stress as he’d said the Odinson’s name. The way he would not quite meet her eyes. 

_ Well, then. _ This  _ was _ unexpected. Had it been unrequited? Or had the elder Odinson taken him to bed? Either way, the rage and betrayal Loki had felt would have been absolute, and he had lost all he had cared for in one fell swoop. It explained why he had not simply bent the knee and accepted whatever punishment Odin would have doled out for his transgressions. She did not think him a saint - he must have  _ something _ for the staid Einherjar to have turned against him - yet it did not sound as if it would have resulted in a banishment.

And yet Loki had broken with them both, and had thrown himself on the mercy of whatever dwelt between the stars.

She couldn’t have arranged it better herself if she’d had millennia to plan it. Luck, that faithless whore, that was both brute to him and benefactor to her in one fell swoop, had thrown him Thanos’s way when the Titan was threatening her realm. And all because Loki knew not from whence his seiðr came, and had fet his tender feelings for his brother bruised by the lie.

It was astonishing, truly, how close the universe came to swinging on a fulcrum. In more than one reality, Thor prevailed and Loki did not fall, and so he did not encounter Thanos. And in that reality Hela scrabbled through the stars for a way to halt the desecration of her realm, instead of having the solution in her hands; a weapon ready to be aimed.

The boy wouldn’t like it, of course. He had placed his trust in his family and was still sore from the loss of it; he would not take kindly to being manipulated once again. Well, that couldn’t be helped. He would get over it - eventually. 

No, this was the only way. 

Even as Hela pressed her hand to his chin and tugged him to her, flowing over him like water, she knew exactly what she needed to do.

*

Later, she propped herself up on an elbow and watched him feign sleep. “You will need to go back, brother,” she told him, almost tender. “I have use for you yet in the Mad Titan’s employ.”

He froze to stillness beneath her and did not respond. A muscle in his jaw jumped as she traced idle fingers over his chest, watching the flush gather beneath his skin. He was so beautiful, her brother, so lovely in this borrowed form. She could almost see the coils of seiðr-fire beneath his skin as she edged her fingers beneath the crumpled linens and wrapped them loosely around his cock. “You will go back, and you will suffer what you must, and you will prevail.” She ran a finger along the length of him, scraping a fingernail lightly along that delicate skin.

Loki shuddered. “You are making a curious argument for my departure, Hela,” he murmured, opening his eyes at last. He made no move to pull away, his cock rapidly hardening in Hela’s grip. He let his legs fall open to give her better access, an eyebrow rising half-questioningly, half-challenging as his hips pushed up into her grip, his intent plain.

Had he done this with Thor? Or was that another way in which he had been frustrated?

Hela obliged and pushed the bedlinen away, bending her head. His cock rose, lovely and flush, arching against his flat belly. He was already wet, she noted, circling the crown with her fingers to gather up the slick fluid there. He had either been feigning sleep for longer than she’d noticed, or he was simply that responsive to her attentions.  _ Well. _ Both options were equally flattering.

Not that it made a difference in the end; once they were done, she would not hesitate to send him back. He had told her all he knew of Thanos, and of his plans, and of his torturers, which had been enough to confirm that the Titan would not stop until he had drowned Hel in more people than it could easily absorb. Perhaps not intentionally - perhaps the madman even thought that what he was doing was right, and certainly his disciples were lit by a religious fervour - but that did not matter. Thanos would not stop, and Hel would fall.

And so there was no question of letting Loki stay with her, not when he was in a position to find out Thanos’s plans, and twist them to their benefit. Not when Loki could use the Mad Titan’s own army to free her, and to take Asgard. Before a force such as that, not even Odin’s enchantments would hold.

No, much as he might protest at being sent back into the hands of his torturers, Loki would have to put that silver tongue of his to good use and figure out a way to turn the situation to his advantage. She would not accept him withdrawing from the field so easily.

Still… she did not have to send him back immediately. He had spent hours with her before, and returned back to the moment of his death. It surely did not matter if they took a few more hours before she returned him to the Titan’s tender ministrations. She could indulge him - and herself - just this once.

And he did have such a lovely cock, so sweet and rosy it made her cunt throb and her mouth water. What could it hurt to have him again?

After all, hadn’t he himself said that he retained little memory of his sojourn in Hel, except in dreams? She would need to make sure that this visit was sufficiently memorable.

“ Brother,” she breathed, and licked across the crown of his cock, tasting salt and seiðr. She stared up at him challengingly, watching his pupils expand and his mouth fall open. His face and chest was flushed red, throwing into stark relief the marks she’d already left on him.  _ He is mine, _ a small part of her whispered.  _ I claimed him. _ For all that he might share Thor’s bed in Asgard or across the Nine Realms, in Hel he was hers alone.  _ One more time,  _ she thought.  _ What could it hurt? _ “Loki.  _ Don’t you dare close your eyes. _ ”


	4. Chapter 4

The flood of new arrivals did not abate in the coming months; if anything, it intensified. Every other day saw another world stricken by the Mad Titan’s madness, and the queues for the gates soon stretched farther than could be seen from even the tallest tower.

Hela watched the slow progression of the arrival train from high atop the battlements, an army of advisors at her side vying to offer her options on how to address the problem.  _ As if there is anything at all to be done, confined as we are, _ she thought, pensive. Others were surely opposing the Titan, but their efforts appeared to be in vain: the days progressed and the flood did not slacken, the queues lengthening to obscene proportions. She had increased Hel’s uptake as far as practical, but the system she had designed all those eons ago was simply not capable of handling this much entropy this quickly.

If she left the queues intact - if she did not act - each successive planet devastated by Thanos would join the long train of desperate entrants, come to Hel to beg for shelter. That was not a practical solution for the long term; the increased delays impacted the well-being of those begging for entrance, leaving them exposed for too long to the horrors of the Niflheim winds with no protection but the scant comfort they could offer each other. There was a reason that the worst punishment Hel could inflict was to cast someone out; Hela had seen first-hand what happened to those left outside of the city gates. The longer the arrivals waited before being admitted, the longer their recovery time once they were inside the city. They would contribute less than they consumed the longer their wait, and that would mean an even longer wait for those following.

If she chose to act, she had two options open to her: firstly, she could reject those who reached Hel’s gates in need of the most succour, the ones who would be the biggest drain on the city’s resources in the short-term. If not that, then she could reduce the city itself, whittling away those provisions which were a comfort and not a necessity. Turn Hel from a city into a camp, providing nothing more than temporary respite from the devouring winds outside.

Could she do it? Could she cut a second swathe through the desperate souls begging her for intercession, casting aside those she would struggle to save? Or would she be forced to cannibalise her own city to hold off the inevitable?

Either way, hundreds of billions would still be lost. In many ways it was the worst of all possible fates: a desolate, protracted oblivion, an erosion of the soul until nothing but hunger remained.

There was, however, possibly an even bigger threat waiting in the wings. Hela had never been able to ascertain precisely from whence the Niflheim winds came - certainly nothing so helpful as weather patterns seemed to cause them - but they had slowly grown in strength in the last few centuries. Either it was all a remarkable coincidence that the storms had strengthened as the demands on her had increased, or the carnivorous winds preying on the souls stranded outside her protection were a bigger threat than she had originally supposed. And if so, how big a threat  _ were _ they? Would she be able to withstand the gales, or would she soon find that her only option was to find a way to destroy the souls outside before they joined the predatory tempest battering Hel’s walls each night?

Her only piece in the game - the only lever she had left at her disposal - was the cuckoo she had planted in Thanos’s nest. Surely, she thought, Loki would be able to turn the situation to his advantage, leveraging both seiðr and silver tongue to gain the Titan’s favour and in so doing bring her a tool she could use. She did not fear the possibility of him turning away, or hiding; such was not his nature. He was too full of his own injured ego, still, to spend much time licking his wounds. No, Hela thought, he would make the best of a bad situation.

The worst case scenario was Loki returning to her having spent his seiðr and bearing little information of value. She was also not blind to the risk that she could have misjudged what awaited him in the Titan’s court, and that he might not return at all, his soul consumed in a way which did not lead back to her. But there was little she could do about that now, and even less benefit she could gain from thinking it over and over. She let the thought rest. Loki would come back to her when he was ready, and he would bring her something she could use against the Titan.

He had to.

She - and Hel - were fast running out of other options.

*

In the end, Loki’s return managed to surprise even her.

The first she heard of it was a commotion at the city gates, something noisome and alarming enough to drift through the high windows of the throne room. It was echoed by the sensation of a blow to Hela’s breast, as if it had been she who had been struck and not the gates themselves. Hela had an odd moment of almost-panic. She’d thought the tipping point of the winds some time off, perhaps four or five centuries away. Had she miscalculated?

Yet, for all the commotion, no one had called her. The gates were damaged, but the alarm had not sounded and none of the guards had called for her.

No, there was really only thing it could have been.  _ Loki. _ Hela’s heart gave an odd lurch at the realisation, relief and fear both.  _ He must be badly injured to have lost control of his seiðr like this. _ Well, that was a good sign, surely; his death would have been hard-earned. He must be bringing her something useful. He  _ must _ . How badly was he injured? Would he be able to come to her under his own power?

The answer to that last, it quickly became apparent, was a resounding  _ no _ . Calder had to carry him to her, spilling the body in a heap of limbs at the foot of her throne. “The prince was brought to us like this, your grace,” Calder said, attempting to arrange the body in a way that looked more or less humanoid. “I swear to you, he arrived this way.” The Einherjar was pale with effort; he must have borne the brunt of it, Hela realised.

“ Yes,” she murmured, her brow furrowing. The corpse before her was almost too damaged for recognition, the injuries so severe that death had been -  _ must _ have been - almost instantaneous, even for someone as seiðr-rich as Loki.

_ He could not have walked here like this. Who brought him? _ Who had given up their place in the queue to bring Loki to her? Or had he simply been passed from hand to hand, along the whole winding length of it, travelling for days before he’d crossed Calder’s notice? Had he been trapped outside the gates along with the rest of the grasping, desperate masses, his spirit and seiðr whittled away? Why had she not thought to provide for this eventuality?

She sat down on the dais beside the body, and stroked back the black hair tenderly.  _ Brother. What has happened to you? _

His injuries were obscene. His back was crushed, his spine pulverised into paste. His large bones had multiple breaks and fractures, and he looked as though someone had taken him by the scruff of the neck and shaken him until his head had separated from his neck. The only thing keeping him together was the thin covering of meat and skin; all that was inside him, all his tender organs, had been turned to offal. Hela traced the edge of one shattered cheekbone, trying to find a place to touch him that was not injured. “Child.  _ Loki. _ Who did this to you?”

Had it been the Mad Titan, she wondered, and the gnawing pit of rage in her belly grew hotter. Had Loki failed in his attempt to thwart him and been punished for it? Had the Titan declared war on her outright?

But the injuries did not look like what had been inflicted by the Titan’s children, nor on any others in her realm that came to her from Thanos’s slaughter. If she didn’t know any better, she would have thought the boy had fallen from a great height. Whoever had done this had treated Loki - had treated someone who was  _ hers _ \- as little more than a ragdoll.

Loki’s eyes opened. The whites of his eyes were flooded with burst capillaries, his pupils fixed. He blinked, blood trickling from his tear-ducts, his lips moving soundlessly.

“ I know,” Hela said gently, her seiðr already working, picking over the worst of his injuries and sorting what could be dealt with now and what would have to wait. “Sleep for a while.”  _ I have you. _ Blessedly, that seemed enough. The boy’s eyes closed on a soundless sigh and he went lax in her arms.

She did not move for a long moment. Who had done this? Who had dared to treat one of hers - her standard-bearer, her  _ brother _ \- like this? Who had  _ dared _ ?

Beside her, Calder cleared his throat. Hela looked up at him, her eyes narrowed. “What?”

“ I just - will he be staying, your grace?” He squirmed at the heat in her gaze. “I only ask, because, well, the gates…”

_ Fuck the fucking gates. _ Loki had carved into them when little more than a distressed infant. She didn’t want to imagine the damage he’d done in his current state. “Add more guards,” she said curtly, her gaze fixed on Loki’s sleeping face. “I cannot tend to them until I address the problem.”

Calder cleared his throat again.

“ _ What? _ ” she snapped.

“ If - if you were to -” Calder met her eyes and gulped, stumbling to a halt. “That is, I mean, I’ll see to it, your grace.” He bowed jerkily and practically ran down the throne steps.

Hela turned back to Loki. He looked…

He looked  _ broken _ .

After a moment’s thought, she unclipped her cloak from her shoulders and allowed it to settle over the boy’s form. It likely wouldn’t help him any, but she felt oddly better if she didn’t have to look at the mess they’d made of him. Whoever  _ they _ were.

*

It took Loki four days to wake. Hela had moved him to her chambers after she had repaired enough of his injuries to be reasonably sure she could move him without making things worse, and had then simply wrapped him in her seiðr and summoned some comely maidens to smear milk and honey on his lips. Loki’s body had burned with an inexplicable fever - higher than she’d seen in Aesir, let alone in a Jötun - and she had wondered during the worst of it whether she would be able to heal him. Whether he had come to her permanently, this time, only so that she could watch him fade away into nothingness as his form dissolved.

She spent the time alternating between watching the queues outside the gates lengthen, and Loki’s body burn with fever. Maybe, some small, traitorous part of her thought, this was the universe trying to tell her that she should be seeking the Titan instead. Maybe she was trying to delay the inevitable and Hel was meant to fall.

Maybe she had made a mistake in allowing Loki to mirror her so closely, to spend so much time with her and yet walk free. Maybe -

“ Have you been watching me sleep?” Loki’s eyes were still closed, but his familiar drawl was back, albeit a little ragged. After a moment, he blinked and looked up at her. “That’s a little creepy.”

The rush of relief she felt at hearing him speak - at seeing his eyes open and having the familiar clear pale green look back at her - was almost debilitating. She felt it wash over her like a wave, stem to stern, and had to swallow hard against it.

_ It’s only natural, _ she reminded herself.  _ He’s the best tool in my arsenal. _ It was perfectly normal to be relieved she had not lost him to entropy, that she had not been boxed in by events beyond her control.

“ Watching over my injured brother is creepy?” She sat down beside him on the bed.

“ You say ‘injured’. I say ‘turned to paste’.” He raised himself up on his elbows, looking down at himself. His hair was neatly brushed, a lock coming free to hang over his forehead. Hela held very still and did not reach for it. “And also ‘naked’.”

Hela shrugged. “It was difficult to see what I was doing after a while. I thought you would appreciate a minimum of scarring.” And a not inconsiderable part of her had wanted to ensure that she missed nothing; that there was no wound hidden from her sight.

“ My hypothetical bed partners thank you,” Loki said sardonically, his lip curving. He smoothed a hand over the exposed skin of his abdomen experimentally, as if checking the extent of his bodily integrity. “Although if you’re planning to send me back for more of the same, it does feel a little bit like an exercise in futility.”

She made a noncommittal sound at that even as her stomach clenched at the thought. 

Sometime during the second night, Loki’s form had flickered, the membranes around his body almost fully dissolved. Hela had poured so much of her seiðr into buttressing his defences that her own reserves had run low, and she had been forced to access Hel’s communal supply. Entire sections of the city had briefly ceased to exist as she had diverted her will and the will of her subjects into keeping Loki’s soul intact.

Whoever had killed him had done so thoroughly, leaving nothing to chance. And Loki, well…

Loki had already come to her three times, and stayed with her each time that little bit longer. Had he worn too deep a groove in the path to her? Had she made it too easy for him to return to Hel?

She’d sent him back three times, and each time he had returned to her more broken. Each time had seemed logical to her that he must return, though he had come to disagree with her. She wondered at his temperament, and at hers. Surely to keep at this would be the definition of insanity?

And yet…

Loki stretched, the bed linens puddling around his waist. “D’you know, I think he meant to tear my head off.” He rolled his neck, vertebrae popping.

“ Yes,” Hela murmured, watching him carefully. “I imagine that was rather the idea. Who was your opponent? Another child of the Mad Titan?”

Loki snorted. “Nothing quite so memorable. A beast, nothing more. But I did not, that is -” his cheeks grew pink. “I let him get too close to me. I should have been more alert.” He rubbed a rueful hand across the back of his neck. “Well, at least Thor has his victory. I always did want to be sung of in song, although I hadn’t quite imagined I would be the monster rather than the hero.” His tone was light, offhand, with only the tightness of the skin around his eyes betraying the remnants of his fear. It hadn’t been an easy death.

“ Thor?” Hela stared blankly at him. “Thor did this?” Thor had pulverised his organs, had crushed his spine, had separated his skull from his neck?  _ Thor _ ?

“ Well. Thor’s… associates. It doesn’t matter.” He wrapped the linens around his waist and carefully got to his feet, visibly testing his balance. “This is - you do remarkable work, sister. Better than Eir’s best.”

Hela was still reeling from that last revelation. “It helps to start off with the dead rather than the dying,” she said absently.  _ Thor? _ No, she could not square this with what little she knew of the eldest Odinson, nor how she had supposed the two of them interacted. Foolish blundering she could buy; leaving Loki as little more than offal she couldn’t imagine under any stretch of the imagination.  _ “Thor _ permitted your execution?”

“ Ah.” Loki grimaced. “He may not yet be aware of it. I had left him injured on another building when I encountered the beast. Although, on second thoughts, he probably knows by now. They all do, I expect; the beast was hardly subtle.” He looked around. “Where is my armour?”

Hela waved a hand and clothed him. “I will need more than that, brother,” she said, and even she was surprised at how steady her voice sounded. “I need to know what happened with Thanos. Why were you fighting Thor?” If the eldest Odinson had pledged himself to the Titan… if  _ Asgard _ had…

But no, she could not credit that. Surely even Odin’s hypocrisy could only stretch so far.

“ Hmmm. You know, I am not entirely sure on the particulars of it.” Loki looked away, a shadow falling over his face. He looked older, suddenly, no longer the callow youth she still thought of him as. There were lines on his face that she did not remember from his last visit, though it had been but a few years. “I convinced Thanos that I could be an ally. That I could be useful to him in his plans. And, you know…” He was silent for a long moment. He would not meet her eyes. “I’m not entirely sure whether I was lying to him.”

Hela did not speak, her gaze fixed on the crumpled bedlinen, on the imprint of his body on the bed. Her body was braced as if Loki’s words had delivered a blow alongside their gentle tone. Her fists were clenched.  _ I could be useful to him in his plans.  _ Loki’s words echoed, heavy in the way Odin’s banishment of her had been, the chains around her drawing that little bit tighter. All she could think of was the howling wind outside, and the way it had battered the closed windows as she had worked on Loki’s disintegrating form, trying to keep him from dissipating into nothing. While Loki...

_ I could be useful to him in his plans. _

While Loki had been so deep in the role she had chosen for him that he had come close to working against her. 

Loki had not noticed anything askance, continuing in the same vein. “ And Thor… well, Thor is Thor, I suppose. He has found others as insufferable as he is, and together they have banded together to be even more overbearing.” There was a flash of black and green in her vision as Loki sat down beside her, reaching for her hand. His own flesh was cool, cooler than she remembered, the skin even paler. “Hela. Do you know if they won?”

She could look, of course. She could check whether the world he had fought on still existed. She could -

_ I could be useful to him in his plans.  _ He was so beautiful, her brother, even as he spoke blithely of betrayal.

She had made the mistake of sitting with him these last three nights. She had yielded to the same sentiment she despised in others, and this is what it had bought her. It was astonishing. In all the time she had worked on Loki - with all his visits, and every layer of her seiðr wrapped around her, and every memory of Hel she knew stopped at the city gates - the one option she had never considered was his betrayal of her. Did that make her a fool or simply weak? Perhaps both, in that she had retained faith in Loki’s fealty to her even as she had sent him to Thanos’s court. 

“ What makes you think I will tell you?” She said at last, her voice hard. “I sent you back to find me a weapon against the Titan, not to add yourself to his arsenal.”

Loki did not take his hand away from hers. “I know.” He was silent. “I went back to his children, sister. I woke up in a torture chamber. I would like to say that, had I remembered you - had I remembered what we discussed - I would have made a different choice. But I do not wish to lie to you on this.” He swallowed. “You should not have sent me back,” he said at last in a small voice, barely audible. “What they did… what  _ I _ did…”

She closed her eyes against the memory of him lying at the foot of her throne, held together by nothing more than the memory of flesh.  _ Sentiment,  _ she thought bitterly. “Is that why you did it?” she asked in a stranger’s voice. “Because I would not let you stay?”

He shrugged. “Who can say now. You know how differently the other realms feel when you are in Hel.”

She did not, in point of fact, but she did not share this with him. It had been too long since she had come to this realm, and she had not had the benefit of repeat visits. He was probably the expert on the sensations, having had so many points of comparison.

She shook her head to clear it. “Tell me, then. What did the Titan share with you? What intelligence did your almost-treachery purchase me?”

Loki pursed his lips, his eyes narrowing. For a moment, she almost thought he looked… hurt. “Very well,” he said slowly. “We must all sing for our supper, I suppose.”

She could have struck him then for that presumption.  _ Yes, brother, we must. I must restore the gates you damaged, and I must decide which of the unfortunates outside to destroy utterly so that their souls are forever lost. We must all sing for our suppers, before we lose what little voice we have. _

She could see that it troubled him, his weakness. That the Titan had bested him. That he had been willing to trade anyone -  _ everyone _ \- to preserve his own skin. That he would have done anything, anything at all to make the torture stop, to pass the poison cup from his lips.

If she was anyone other than herself, she might have let the strange, hollow feeling in her belly flood her with the sour taste of fear. Instead, she thought of the endless queue outside and hardened her heart against it. She did not fear for herself, of course, and she could not afford the luxury of sentiment, not while there was work to be done.

Not while there was still a chance.

“ Tell me,” she said, pitiless.

Slowly, haltingly, he did.

*

By the time he had finished his tale - curiously stripped of much embroidery and embellishment - it was sun-down. Loki’s voice was hoarse from speaking, the lines in his face deeper. The tale he told was a simple enough one: his fear, his pain, his surrender. Saying anything he could think of to make his torturer - a sorcerer called Ebony Maw - stop for even one moment. Letting his seiðr be twisted and corrupted, letting it be be leached from him to be coupled with an object of power. An Infinity Stone, Ebony Maw had called it. The term held no meaning for Hela.

“ It felt a little bit like your seiðr, actually.” His lips quirked. “They both did, the mind stone in the sceptre, and the Tesseract. Re-shaping reality in some way to their owner’s will. Mind, space… other ways. There are six of them, I believe. Thanos has one -  _ had _ one - and the Midgardians may have successfully defended the Tesseract and taken the sceptre for their own, much good may it do them. They are too frail to hold any of the stones without being consumed, and so all they can do is lock them away.” He paused, thoughtful. “You were right the first time, sister. The last time I was here, when you asked me what he means to do. He does not merely mean to accelerate. He means to accomplish his goals in the blink of an eye.”

“ Half of all life,” she said. Her mouth was dry. “All at once?”

There was a dark look in Loki’s eyes, a narrowing of his gaze. He bit his lip. “All at once.”

Half of all life, taken from Yggdrasil and dumped on her doorstep. Half of  _ everything _ , made into the thing that would consume Hel by inches if she permitted it. And if she did not? Would she have the strength to destroy that many souls before they weakened Hel’s defences?

_ And where is Odin in all of this? _ What was Asgard doing to halt the Titan’s ambitions? Where were the other powers, those realms who had never fallen within Asgard’s dominion?

Was  _ anyone _ planning to act? Or had they crawled beneath their beds in terror and wished for the choice to be taken away?

“ You should rest,” she told him abruptly, and got to her feet. “I will be back presently.”

She left before he could answer, the expression of surprise not yet faded from his face.

*

The westernmost parapet had the clearest view of the queue, stretching out from Hel’s periphery to beyond the horizon. She had begun experimenting with the seiðr she found in some of the newer arrivals, plucking out from the masses those she would not suffer to remain inviolate and planting them inside Hel’s gardens. Most had withered to nothing, but a few had taken root and even borne fruit. The fruit itself had been a bitter thing, almost devoid of seiðr, but those planted did not draw from the city in the way that new arrivals often did. And as bitter and unpalatable as the fruit was, it was still a contribution of sorts.

The problem was, no one wanted to eat it. Even those who were desperate for sustenance hesitated before consuming it, and their recovery did not seem quickened by it. The weapons formed from the wood did not stay true, and the dwellings did not hold their shape.

Perhaps it would be kinder to simply extinguish them. She had tested this out with transgressors and had found it effective, albeit draining. She could walk the length of the queue once a day, and snuff out those candles which did not burn as brightly as the others. She could whittle down the backlog so that…

_ So that when the Titan sends billions upon billions more to my doorstep, I am practiced at annihilation and can do my part. _

How many would she have to destroy for Hel to stand a chance? A hundred billion? A thousand? More? How many to guarantee Hel’s defences?

And could she do it quickly enough to prevent the winds from battering down the ivory gates?

She only had her seiðr to draw on here. Even if she took Loki’s and slaved him to her, she did not think they had enough power to destroy that many souls that quickly. She was a queen without an army, banished to this accursed place while Odin benefited from all the treasures she and her Einherjar had brought him, treasures that were rightfully -

She stopped.  _ The vault. _ The vault where Odin had locked away the spoils of war she had brought back, regardless of their value. Trinkets, jewels, some small items of power…

And the Eternal Flame.

Hela stared blindly from the parapet, heedless of the wind that clawed at her seiðr-shield. She was stunned, as if a great blow had struck her; or perhaps a flash of lightning had lit up the parts of her knowledge she had previously left to languish in darkness. It was so  _ obvious,  _ she could not comprehend how she could have missed it before.

She had spent years staring at the queue, wondering how to shorten it. How to safeguard her little kingdom against what she had perceived as a threat. She had been wrong in that, so stunningly short-sighted it took her breath away. She had clearly grown too comfortable in Hel, her vision too narrow. She had not seen the self-evident truth: Thanos had not been sent by the universe to distract her from taking back Asgard. 

He’d been sent to make sure she had no other choice.

With the Eternal Flame she could conquer Asgard, buttress the defences of Hel, and spread her dominion across the length and breadth of Yggdrasil. The more souls Thanos destroyed, the more she would grow her army. With access to both Hel and the other worlds, what force would be able to stand against her?

Thanos wasn’t her destroyer. He was her  _ tool _ , as Loki was. A supplicant at the foot of her throne. All she needed to do was figure out a way to wield him effectively. Infinity Stones? A minor distraction when all of the afterlife lay open before her. When the  _ Endless Flame _ itself was almost within her grasp.

When she went back to her bed chamber, she found Loki still where she had left him, as if frozen in place. “Tell me more about Asgard,” she snapped, shoving his shoulders back into the bed, straddling him. “Tell me about  _ Odin. _ How goes the Allfather’s health?”

Loki’s mouth parted in surprise.

*

She woke before him some hours later, watching the creep of dawn across the floor. Loki was a pliant weight at her back, his arms wrapped around her in sleep. She still ached pleasantly from their earlier coupling, and the air was cool and soothing against her overheated skin. She slid away from Loki’s embrace and stood bare at the window, looking out across Hel. Most of the denizens were still sleeping, although those few nocturnal races housed within went about their normal business.

Hela glanced back at the figure in the bed. He’d kicked off the covers in sleep, his naked form pale as moonlight against the stark white of the bedlinen. His hair was a spill of black ink against the pillow, his mouth still ruddy from where she had bitten him. There were other marks on him as well, bites and bruises and scratches; she had not restrained herself in the least.

She would send him back, she knew that now. She had addressed her lapse into sentiment and would not permit it to happen again, no. He would have to go back and work towards her initial plan all the more, and as his only priority. Her problem had clearly been one of scope: she’d thought too narrowly. She’d aimed to regain what she had lost, and to protect what little she had. That was the action of a princeling, a petty, limited creature; she saw that now.

The path was clear: she would send Loki back and unseat odin, wearing down the old goat’s stranglehold on life. With him gone, she could take Asgard - and the Eternal Flame - unopposed. She would take the throne. She would take the Nine Realms.

And then, with the armies of Hel at her back, she would take everything else.


	5. Chapter 5

“ Oh,  _ come on! _ ” Hela scowled at him and folded her arms. She did not move to rise from her throne, staring down at the figure sprawled at the bottom of the steps with ill-disguised ire. “I just sent you back! How long was that, two weeks?”

“ Two years,” Loki muttered, a faint flush staining his cheeks. He probed the wound on his chest and grimaced. “If we’re measuring from the last time that I, uh…”

“ Died?”

“ I was going to say,  _ had a close call. _ But I suppose ‘died’ might be more accurate.” He stared up at her challengingly. “You said you would not,” he accused. “You said I could stay.”

Hela scowled. “I said nothing of the sort.” She had been very careful on that point, as she had been in focusing her thoughts on the problem at hand and  _ not  _ on how Loki was faring in the Titan’s - or Odin’s - court. “And you still had a part to - will you  _ stop _ poking that!” She pinched the bridge of her nose and breathed deep. “What was it this time?” She asked, not looking up. She felt him move towards her, his movements doubtless a little stiff on account of the wound through his torso. “Another of the Mad Titan’s children became tired of your prattling? Or did the beastman lose his temper?” She had not told him of her plans when she had thrown him out of Hel, but had banished him in his sleep. There had been the chance that the beastman would have killed him again, of course, but Loki’s story had made her discount that. Thor had not known, and Thor - based on what she knew of him - would not permit it to happen a second time.

The geas binding Hela to Niflheim had not abated; Odin continued upon the throne, and the winds outside grew ever-stronger.

Had he made  _ any _ progress? “Tell me,” she commanded. “Tell me what you have accomplished, for I do not see the Allfather’s head at my feet.”

Loki blanched at that, his colour fading to a papery grey. “Was that why you sent me?” he asked at last. “You wanted me to kill Odin?”

She thought of the now near-constant pressure on the defences, of the fading forms of her oldest and most trusted advisors. She thought of the souls she had annihilated, of the constant murmur of prayers and begging that rose from the queue winding about Hel as if they could smother the city through their sheer numbers.

Soon, they would be able to. Soon, she would have no choice but to walk among them and smite entire worlds from existence, a goddess not of death but of annihilation. Of desolation.  _ Was that why you sent me, he asks me. As if any of us have the luxury of choice. And yet he comes to me again - and from a simple wound, a wound which should not have been mortal, a wound he should have been able to prevent - and has the gall to challenge me.  _ She no longer had the luxury of sentiment.

“ You have a history of kin-slaying,” she said instead, and watched with mean satisfaction as Loki paled yet further. “And if not Odin’s, then at least Thor’s. Or was that, too, beyond your means?” It was a low blow, she knew. Thor’s death was almost certainly not something Loki would have been able to bring about, willingly or no. Odin’s… perhaps. Certainly he could have deposed him, separated him from his source of power. But Thor? No.

Loki stared up at her, mouth parted, then slowly made his way up the steps to her throne, settling before her on his knees. “Was that why you sent me back?” he asked again, and there was a darkness to his voice and to his eyes that she had not seen before. “Am I to kill everyone I lo- know?” He was up on his knees, his elbows on either side of her, his hands sliding down to cup her hips. His fingers traced the seam of her armour, gratifyingly cool where they touched her bare skin through the armour’s motion slits. Loki was still watching her with hooded eyes, an intent look on his face. “Is there no other use you can find for me, sister?”

Oh, he was desperate all right, and not for anything she would give him here. And yet…

Yet there was enough of her in him to make her hesitate.

Perhaps things had not been as easy for him as she had assumed. “Stop that.” She grabbed his wrists and tugged his arms away. She pulled him up and beside her, letting him crowd into her side, one hand wrapped around her waist, the other resting idly on her knee. The torn-open wound at his chest was the right height for her gauntlet’s spurs to fit snugly against it and she felt him draw unneeded breath at the feeling of that violation, of the extension of her will spearing him open.

Hela turned her face to his, watching the flush rise in his cheeks. “How did you die, brother? Tell me.”

His jaw worked. “It doesn’t matter,” he murmured. His grip on her tightened. “I died, let it be enough.” He pressed his mouth to her jaw, more a bite than a kiss. “Let it be finished, Hela.” The hand on her knee slid upwards.

His seiðr flowed true from him, unlacing the edges of her armour, letting him worm a hand between the tight strips of leather to touch her skin.

_ His seiðr… _ How had he come to her so strong? Why had he not used his seiðr to defend himself?

Why was he here?

“ If it doesn’t matter, then you shouldn’t mind telling me,” Hela said. She nudged her arm back infinitesimally, feeling the jolt of it travel through his wound. His hand stilled, his fingertips resting on the heated skin of her inner thighs. She fought the urge to close her legs around him, to welcome those lovely long fingers inside.  _ Not yet. _ She’d held off for this long, she could contain this for a little longer. “Tell me,” she murmured, and turned to bite at the long, pale column of his neck. “Calder tells me you came to the gates from Svartalfheim. No one has come to Hel from that realm for eons.”

Loki was perfectly still beneath her. “Yes,” he said at last, voice low. “There is nothing there.”

“ And yet you found  _ someone _ to kill you. That is remarkably resourceful, even for you, brother.” She bit him again, drawing blood. He shuddered against her, his fingers curling slightly to scratch at the skin of her thighs. The hand around her waist clasped her tight enough to break bone.  _ Such a lovely, savage boy. _ And so like her, despite everything. “However did you manage that? Surely you did not do it yourself?”

She felt him shiver and stopped, surprised. “Loki?” She pulled away from him, turning so she could see him better. “Loki.  _ Did _ you do it yourself?” She touched the edges of his wound, measuring length and depth. No, that could not have happened. He would have had to run full-tilt into a sword or spur of some sort to manage that sort of damage. He had not been mistreated, so it had not been torture, then. Not even captivity.

Why was he here?

“ Loki?”

He would not meet her eyes. “I died in battle,” he said softly. He was staring up at the light filtering through the hall’s high windows. “I died in battle, and yet I am here.”

“ You are mine first,” Hela reminded him. She was chilled for a moment by the realisation that he had intended to run, not to her, but to Valhalla. To the ever-golden halls. To where  _ Thor  _ would be by his side. She caught his chin and turned him to face her. “Loki. I did not send you back so you could keep dying. Who did this?”

He shook his head. “They are dead, sister. Dead, and dust. As am I, evidently.”

The blow, when it came, was evidently unexpected. Loki tumbled down from her throne and across the steps, only managing to roll to his feet at the bottom. “What was  _ that _ for?” he shouted, suddenly enraged. He was a mess, his face blue and bruised from the Svartalfheim air, his wound still a jagged cut into his abdomen. Even his seiðr was bruised, the green of his magic edged with a sickened yellow as he called his powers to himself and his clothing rippled into that of his armour. “I did what I was supposed to! Thanos killed me, and you sent me back. The fucking  _ beast _ killed me, and  _ you sent me back! _ You sent me  _ back _ , Hela, and they put me in chains! In  _ chains _ , like an  _ animal! _ Odin would have -”

“ Locked you away, like he did me?”  _ Cast you aside, did he? And you didn’t even fight him! Too busy mooning over the fucking Odinson!  _ She stood, sweeping her hair back and up into her helmet. Her own battle armour settled around her like a second skin as she bore down the steps to him in a few swift strides. She crowded him back against the nearest column, keeping him there with tendrils of green-tinged seiðr, watching his own powers struggle and fail to free him from her grasp. “And yet you’re here, and not in a cell.” She reached out, one hand on his jawline, another pressed against the length of him. Ah, he was still hard for her, despite his panic and his rage. Despite… “ _ Tell. Me. _ ”

He trembled in her grip, helpless and so very lovely. “They killed her,” he gasped. “Mother. Malekith, and Algrim, and all the others. They killed her, and they would have killed Thor, and Odin would do  _ nothing. _ And - and -  _ someone _ had to act! Someone had to avenge Mother! Someone had to -”

“ Protect Thor?” Her rage was a live thing, a wild, helpless animal she kept chained. Protect  _ Thor _ .

His breath ran out. He stared at her, panting, hot and hard in her hand, a hard ridge against the leather of his armour. “ _ Yes, _ ” he bit out. “He would have been killed, and it would have achieved  _ nothing _ .”

_ How touching, _ Hela seethed.  _ How nice to have the liberty to think on who you would sacrifice, and who you would like to spare. How nice to have that choice! _ And while Loki had been agonising whether Thor deserved to die - whether Thor’s death  _ achieved _ something, rather than being an end to itself - Hela had extinguished the light of Dyofor. She’d taken the arrivals and had decided that enough remained of Dyofor between those in Valhalla and those yet living (and those already housed in Hel from eons past) to allow her to snuff out the flickering light in the souls that had come to her on their knees, begging her protection.

“ Well,” Hela said, her voice hard. She loosened the laces of his armour and slid her hand inside, curling her fingers around him. “Now we know. All I have done for you, and you throw it away on  _ sentiment _ .” She pinched the head of his cock cruelly, smiling at the way his entire body shivered. His cock jumped and leaked in her hand from the abuse, Loki’s mouth falling open in outrage. “Is that what they will say of you in the sagas hereafter?  _ And so Loki let himself be slain for love _ .” The words tasted foul in her mouth.  _ And so Hel fell because its queen could not command her weapon. _ She grasped him firmly and tugged, working her fingers over him as he gaped at her, mouth wet and red.

“ Are you angry that I died?” Loki asked, eyes narrowed to slits. “Or are you angry that I died to protect Thor - and not you?” He worked a tendril of his seiðr past her defences and freed a hand, wrapping an arm around her and pulling her to him. His cock fit neatly against the seam of her thighs, pressing wetly against her armour. He looked down between the two of them pointedly, at her fingers wrapped around the rosy head of his cock. His mouth twitched and he glanced up at her. “Jealousy does not become you, sister.”

“ No?” She pinched him again, feeling him jump and spurt pre-come in her hand. If he had died bringing her Odin’s head… If he had died and given her back her entire dominion…

Was it jealousy to resent him for spending the gift of her seiðr on the protection of Odin’s oafish son, when there was a much larger threat hanging over them?

Was it jealousy to wish him to follow her lead implicitly, whether or not he remembered  _ why _ ?

She twisted against him. She loved the feel of him like this, angry and defiant and a little bit broken, held tight in her throne room, in her city, in her  _ world _ , tied by her seiðr and by his, the two of them wrapped around each other like echoes of each other.

“ I am not yet done with you, brother,” she whispered. She bit at him, at his lovely mouth, chasing the tang of copper with her tongue. His hand was at her back, unlacing her armour with urgent fingers, sliding the strips of leather apart at the juncture of her thighs. She fought him - a little, only a little - and let him cut into the armour with his fingers, slicing a space so he could -

“ Please,” he whispered, and she let him go.

He slid to his knees before her, a hand wrapped around his cock, another holding her hip, his mouth on her cunt. His tongue was a blessedly cool balm as he licked at her, sucking her juices with desperate, wet sounds.

“ _ Oh. _ ” She buried her hands in his hair, sweeping it back so she could better see the fan of his dark lashes across his flushed cheeks. He was so very lovely, as sweet and as eager as any youth she’d ridden. She could see the rapid tug and pull of his hand as he worked his cock with short, brutal strokes. His tongue was cool where it pressed against her heated flesh, his teeth grazing her clit as he spread her open. There was a smear of something slick and milky across the edge of his jaw, and suddenly she couldn’t stand it anymore.

She tugged his head away from her, kicking his hand away from his cock, and let herself slide down to straddle his hips, taking him in to the hilt in one swift movement.

Loki’s breath hitched, his eyes wide and startled.

“ That’s better,” Hela said, and licked the taste of herself from his lips. Loki was a solid weight beneath and inside her, his entire body trembling as he rocked - first slowly, then growing in confidence as she did not kick him off - his hands settling tentatively around her hips. “That’s it,” she praised, and hilted her pelvis to welcome him deeper. “Oh, you are so very lovely.” She traced the raw edge of his wound, snaking a thread of seiðr into him.

His eyes fluttered closed, his cock throbbing inside her.

He was thinner than before, she thought. Thinner, and paler, and somehow more frail than all the times he’d come to her, bleeding and broken, needing her to put him back together. How could such a thing have happened? What had Odin done, that even Thanos had not accomplished? Or had this, as all other things seemed to be where Loki was concerned, Thor’s doing?

She fit her mouth against his, raising herself up on her knees until he was almost slipping out of her, then sliding down firmly to take his entire length. He jolted, startled, his hands tightening on her waist. She did it again. Again.  _ Again, _ until he was bruised from it, until he was gasping into her mouth, desperate. It was a brutal pace, uncompromising, and she felt the sharp, brittle edges of his seiðr shudder and throb inside her as she rode him to her own completion.

She was dimly aware that she may have said something, but could not quite recall what. Loki, for his part, looked equal parts startled and gratified at it. He was still hard inside her, the length of him cooler than an Aesir would have been.

He rocked forward gently. “Is this OK?” he whispered, his eyes on hers.

She ought to push him off. She was finished, after all, and she had no interest in whether he was satisfied. He was  _ hers _ , not the other way around, and she had no obligations here, no tender feelings. She -

He rocked forward again, not taking his eyes from hers. Beneath the flush she’d brought to his cheeks, he was still deathly pale and bruised from battle, and she could see the flicker of her seiðr working to knit his wound together as he fucked her with slow, careful strokes.

“ Loki,” she said, and pressed her forehead to his. “Yes, that’s it. Come on, brother. You can have this. Did you remember this away from my court?”

“ I remembered  _ something _ ,” he gasped. “I remembered a mirror who loved me and who hurt me.” His grip on her tightened. “Did you do this to me?” he asked, and his teeth were suddenly bared, closing against the skin of her throat for a moment before he rocked back. “Did you make me this way, sister? Twist something inside me so that I would only look inwards for this?”

Somehow, she did not think he was referring only to her, and a furious jolt went through her at the thought.  _ Thor. _ “Is that what happened?” she asked unsteadily. She ground down against him, gritting her teeth against the overstimulation of her sensitive flesh. “Is that why you can’t let him go?”

He said nothing to that, but did not deny it.

_ No. _ This, she could not permit. Not here, not  _ now. _ Not when he was a solid weight inside her, fucking up into her with wet, obscene sounds, his hands on her hips.

“ Loki,” she whispered. She tugged his hair back and fit a hand around his throat, squeezing until his eyes opened and he choked. “I’ll not let him have you, no matter his will. He could fuck you raw, and you would still come back to me. He could plant a child in you, and it wouldn’t matter. When everything ends, when Asgard falls, when Ragnarok burns Yggdrasil to dust, you will wake up by my side.” She squeezed tightly, watching his eyes glaze and his mouth open. “You’re mine, brother. Whether I use seiðr or the Eternal Flame on you, whether we couple in Asgard or in Hel, you’re  _ mine. _ ”

With one last, helpless thrust, he came, his whole body shuddering as he rode out the waves of his orgasm.

She did not let go of his neck until he’d softened enough to slip out of her. When she did so he fell backwards, gasping, clawing for breath he didn’t need.

He looked a little ridiculous like that, his armour in disarray, his cock a wet, blind thing against his thigh. At least the wound in his chest had knitted together properly. You could barely even see the scar.

With a wave of her hand, Hela set herself to rights and walked back to her throne. She watched him as he staggered to his feet, tucking his cock away and smoothing out the lines of his armour. His fingers hesitated over the healed wound and he looked up at her, a question in his eyes.

She considered. Frigga was dead. Loki, by all accounts, had died in valiant battle in defence of the crown prince.

And Odin…

Odin was alone.

Did she trust him enough to roll the die one more time? She thought she knew enough of him to know what he would do if life was unwillingly thrust back upon him, but… there was always uncertainty, even in this. Did his grudge against Odin outweigh whatever weak, tender feelings he might still harbour for the Odinson?

In truth, the risk was immaterial. She had no other choice.

She would have to trust that Thor’s interest in Midgard would keep him away from Asgard’s throne room; that Loki would see that an opportunity had presented itself and seize it.

She had no other cards left to play.

“ You get one more shot,” she said. She shrugged at his narrowed eyes. It did not matter that he did not want this, that he had speared himself on an opponent’s blade to escape the mess he’d made of his life. What mattered was that Odin had had no hand in Malekith’s defeat, and that the old man was now alone, and weak.

She could not leave Hel yet. But Loki…

“ One more shot, Loki.” She lifted her chin in challenge. “For all I have done for you, for every time I have saved you, brother, I want Odin’s head.” She bared her teeth in a rictus grin. “Trust me when I say that you will not enjoy learning what I will do if I am disappointed.”


	6. Chapter 6

Two months after her return to Hel, Loki turned up at the eastern gate, his throat crushed. This time, Calder clapped him in irons before dragging him to Hela’s throne and kicking him into a genuflection pose with barely restrained rage.

Loki, perhaps sensing that this reunion would not be a repeat of the last time he had visited her throne room, went on his knees easily enough.

Hela stared coldly down at him. The intervening two months had not been kind; Loki was black and blue, his eyes bloodshot and his face red with burst capillaries. There were fingerprints around his throat, purple-black and deep. His head balanced oddly on his neck.  _ Someone snapped his neck, _ she thought with a deep satisfaction. She wasn’t sure whether the vicarious enjoyment she drew from seeing his pain was outweighed by the irritation that he’d come to her ready-bruised when she’d wanted to wring his neck herself.

Well, she could always heal him first, and then kill him again. There was nothing stopping her.

“ Nothing to say, brother?” she asked, abrupt. She had still not moved from her frozen position atop the throne. “No apology? No explanation?”

Loki struggled to his feet, the chains clanking with the movement. “Would you believe me if I offered one?” His voice was hoarse, a shadow of his former self.

_ No longer quite so silver-tongued, Liesmith, _ Hela thought, and she could no longer contain her rage, surging to her feet. “You little  _ brat _ ,” she spat, furious, striding down the throne steps. “You twisted, traitorous little snake! After everything I’ve done for you, after all the times I’ve saved you -“ She reached him in another stride and backhanded him without pausing.

Loki went down with the force of the blow like a felled tree, mouth open in shock. His head hit the stone floor with a heavy  _ thunk _ and he did not move for a long moment, blood trailing from his lips. “Rather belabouring the point, don’t you think?” he muttered under his breath.

Hela grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and hoisted him up to his feet, shaking him like a recalcitrant puppy before shoving him away in disgust. “Brother, I have not yet begun to ‘belabour the point’. Perhaps, after turning you into a permanent part of my domain and having you spend a millennia or two as a source of firewood, I might consider my point made.  _ Perhaps _ -” her eyes narrowed “- I might use you as entertainment instead. Drain off your seiðr a drop at a time and drip the venom of Hel into your veins instead, to watch you dissolve from the inside out. I’m told that it is an exquisite experience.” Her lips drew back from her teeth in a feral smile. “And you will have an eternity to enjoy every aspect of it. At least, until your Mad Titan overwhelms my realm with so many dead that the winds themselves will devour you!”  _ Five centuries, maybe less. And for  _ what?

Loki had gone pale beneath the postmortem lividity staining his skin. “Sister,” he said slowly, hands raised in surrender. “I… I can explain.”

“ Oh,  _ can you _ . Do so, then. Explain to me  _ exactly _ how - after I saved your miserable hide  _ five times _ \- you repaid me!”

“ Well,” Loki said, attempting a thin smile, “you did rather force the issue by throwing me out of the Bifrost.”

Hela’s stare was frigid. “Little princes who fail to kneel for their queen don’t get to use their punishment as an excuse for further treachery. I haven’t forgotten you snivelling on my shoulder after Odin imprisoned you for - how long was it? A week? A month? How light must a slap on the wrist be, Loki Odinson, to preserve your pride? First Odin, then Thanos, and then - who was it? En Dwi Gast? Is there anyone for whom you  _ won’t  _ kneel?”

Loki said nothing to this, swallowing nervously. Then, after a moment, “You were going to kill Thor,” said so quietly it was almost a whisper. It had the air of a confession. “And… I am grateful, sister, for all you have done for me. But I only know that  _ here _ , not away from Hel. For all that your face seemed familiar and dear to me, all I knew then was that you were a stranger, an enemy. And that you would kill me, and Thor. And…” he hesitated. “Despite it all, I did not find it in myself easy to let him die.”

“ A stranger,” Hela repeated dully. Suddenly, all her rage left her in an exhale, leaving her spent. “You  _ wear my colours _ , brother. You… you were my standard-bearer for a millennia, and you…” she laughed, dropping to sit on the lowest step. “The one chance I had to stop what was happening, and it was spent on  _ nothing _ , because you did not  _ know _ me.”

With a cautious glance at Calder - who immediately started to edge to the doors - Loki sat down gingerly next to her. “I didn’t know you,” he agreed. He was silent for a long moment. “I knew that I should,” he offered, as if it should have been enough. “I knew that I… felt… something. But I didn’t know what it was, and…” He fell silent.

“ And I was going to kill Thor,” Hela said bitterly. “All that has happened, and that’s what it comes down to.” She shook her head. “I should have known when you called the Bifrost. I could reach Asgard, I could lay waste to that entire world, and you… all you cared about was saving Thor.”

Loki laughed at that, rueful. “Yes. It does seem rather pathetic when you put it like that.” He looked away. “I wish... “ He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.” He hesitated another moment and then placed a hand on her knee. “Sister. Do you want to know why I’m here?”

She turned to look at him, eyebrows raised. “I imagine you’ll tell me in great detail after the first century or two of the acid drip.”

“ Ah. Well, that might be a trifle late. And I still believe - at least in some ways - that the two of us are on the same side.” Loki turned his head to one side, carefully supporting it with one hand to display the bruises on his throat. “Recognise the grip?”

_ The beastman _ ? No. That wouldn’t matter to her and he wouldn’t raise it. Thanos, then. “Your Mad Titan caught up with you,” she said dully. She reached out and placed her fingertips gently against the purple-black of his skin, tracing the edge of the crushing bruise. Her fingernail caught on the delicate skin and a bead of blood followed her fingers, running slow and steady down Loki’s bare neck. “This is supposed to bring me to  _ what _ , brother? Pity?”

Loki pulled away. “No. Never that. And I will not pretend that I did this willingly, or even knowingly. Only that -”

Hela did laugh, then.  _ Of course.  _ “Don’t tell me. You died protecting Thor.”

Loki managed to blush even with most of his blood doing double-duty as a bruise. “Well. He has a better chance of out-running Thanos than I ever did, so if one of us was to try... And I find that I am still unable to simply stand by and watch him die. Doubtless the humiliation of that will hit at some point, and you are welcome to enjoy it.” He bit his lip. “He’s not here?”

“ No,” and oh, she would have wished it otherwise. To have him at her mercy… “If he is dead, then he has not come here. Valhalla, maybe.”

“ Or alive,” Loki said, and there was something so incredibly  _ naked _ in the hope in his voice, as if he had been stripped down to pure essence.

_ Hope, _ Hela thought scornfully.  _ Hope for what? _ When Asgard lay forever beyond her reach, and her only kingdom was one carved out of her own body. Hel was no more her realm than the corpse housing an ant colony was a queen. And that, too, would fade, destroyed by the Titan’s madness. “If he is alive, it will not be for long. Your Titan will hunt him and wear his skin as a pelt.”

Loki was silent, unable to challenge her on this. Then, “He could run. If he ran, he could…” But he couldn’t seem to bring himself to finish such a ridiculous thought and his voice trailed off.

What else was there to do?

They sat in silence.

*

She gave in, in the end, as Loki must have known she would. She rather thought she would change her mind a bit further on and flay him, perhaps, or strip pieces of his seiðr off his flesh as if filleting a fish. But perhaps Hel would fall before then, if Loki’s tale of the Titan was true. Perhaps there were no millennia left open to her, nor even bare centuries. Perhaps it was only a matter of a few short weeks before the worlds -  _ all  _ the worlds - ended.

She rebuilt his ruined throat, leaving the bruising intact, as a reminder.  Loki’s voice came back the morning that the sky outside of the easternmost gate split open and half the universe arrived at Hel’s gates.

“ This is… what  _ is _ this?” Loki asked, his eyes wide. He stared down at the seething mass pressed against the reinforced walls, his knuckles white where he was braced against the edge of the parapet. “Are those - are those  _ souls _ ?” He looked revolted.

“ I didn’t lie about the firewood,” Hela reminded him. She squared her shoulders, letting loose her cape. “Now, brother. Seeing as you were the reason I failed, you will come with me.”

Loki stared at her. “Where?”

Hela waved a hand down at the endless queues outside, at the deafening wail of pain and anger and loss that rose above it like woodsmoke. “The dead, of course. You are going to choose who will be permitted into Hel, and who I must destroy.” She smiled grimly at his slack-jawed expression. “Come, now, brother. A ruler must make choices for the good of their people and you took away my only other option. So come walk with me, and put your seiðr to good use, saving those we can, and killing those we can’t.”  _ And it will do him good, to see what his actions have brought about. _ Was it not the role of the older sister to always teach her younger siblings? If it took the end of everything, Loki would learn  _ this _ , at least.

“ They are already dead,” he said, his voice quiet. “Hela, they are  _ already dead. _ ”

“ Yes.” She pushed her hair back, her helmet flowing into shape. “And now, we must devour what Thanos has left of their souls, so that they will not devour  _ us _ .” She raised an eyebrow. “It is for the good of Hel, brother. And we must all make sacrifices, do you not agree?”

Loki looked ready to throw up.  _ Perhaps he is rethinking whether Thor was worth this, _ Hela thought, and she drew a small amount of pleasure at his obvious distress.  _ It is too late to have second thoughts, brother. It is far, far too late for that. _ She held out her hand. “Well?”

“ For the good of Hel,” Loki echoed faintly. He took her hand.

*

They fell into a pattern of sorts. Loki could not control his seiðr sufficiently to destroy the souls himself; perhaps that was a convenient fiction, but it mattered little. Hela drew what power she needed from him daily and they walked the queue together, hand in hand. Deciding. Weighing.  _ Judging _ . Loki grew a little paler with each passing day but he did not beg off and Hela did not release him from his duties. They were both tired. They were both drained. And - ultimately - their exhaustion mattered not at all. What was, was.

Thus the days passed, unmarked and unlamented. Hela kept a careful count of the progress they made - slow, too slow - and of the rate of attrition, and spent her nights listening to the howling winds besiege her city. Loki slept beside her, fitful and pale as a ghost, his body wrapped tightly around hers. He seemed more frightened in sleep than he did awake, and he called out piteously in his slumber. Oftentimes it was for Thor; increasingly, it was for her.

Once, it had been for Odin; a horrifying, thin wail, more broken than not. He claimed not to remember it after she woke him from his nightmare.

He did not attempt to apologise again, and Hela was glad of it. She did not think she could have borne it a second time.

It was a miserable existence, growing more barren each day as the city’s reserves were depleted. 

And then, one day, Thor arrived in at the city gates. He blasted his way to the front of the queue in spectacular fashion, via - unless Hela’s eyes were deceiving her or she had started to hallucinate from exhaustion - the fucking  _ Bifrost _ .

*

“ Hela!” Thor called out, raising the axe in his hand to bring it crashing down on the closed gate.

Beside her at the parapet, Loki winced. “He… he probably doesn’t realise what he’s hitting,” he offered. 

She said nothing to Loki’s attempt to placate her, watching Thor’s tantrum from the top of her tower. She found that she could not trust herself to speak, trembling as she was with rage. That he should be here! That he would come  _ here _ , that he would come to  _ her _ !

He seemed determined to break the gates open through sheer brute force, seemingly unable to comprehend that his bodily strength was not relevant here.

Well, almost. He had put a fair amount of his own willpower into the swing and she felt each blow as if they had been delivered to her sternum, but the gates themselves remained intact. That said… they had yet to complete the day’s cull, and the pressure from outside the gates had, if anything, grown stronger.

No, she was being alarmist. Not even  _ Thor _ could -

“ I could… go and reason with him,” Loki ventured, looking even more nervous. “Stop him from -” Thor brought the axe down again, putting his full strength into the blow, and there was a sickening splintering sound.

Hela staggered, her hand to her chest. Something warm and wet spilled over her fingers.  _ The gates, _ she thought, incredulous.Would Hel drown because of the two sons of Odin? Had it truly come down to nothing more than Loki’s sentiment and Thor’s rage?  _ The idiot has - _

“ The gates!” she heard Loki shout, familiar arms folding about her catching her as she fell. “Calder! Secure the -”

*

“ You have  _ no _ sense at all,” Loki whispered angrily. “Are you trying to get us all killed?”

Hela blinked her way back to wakefulness, dimly noting that the boundaries of Hel held fast, that she was in her bedchamber, and that Thor was… not. She turned her head and saw his outline in the doorway, limned by the light from the wide-open window opposite, Loki’s slender silhouette beside him, a hand on the oaf’s over-muscled arm.

“ If you would just -”

“ _ No, _ ” Loki said, even more forcefully. “You can’t just - why did you think I did what I did, brother, and for you to just throw that away -”

“ _ Did what you did _ ?” Thor mocked, sounding so incredibly unlike the image she had of him that Hela blinked. “It might be a time to speak plainly, brother. You let him kill you. You let him -  _ in front of me _ , you let him do that to you.” There was a strange note in Thor’s voice at that, something helpless and broken and betrayed, as if what Loki had done had been unforgivable, and everything that went before paled in comparison. “Am I to mourn you always? Is that how I am to spend my days? ‘Oh, a few years have passed, let’s try that again!’ How many times? How many times did you plan to do this to me?”

“ _ It’s not about you! _ ” Loki shouted, then broke off coughing. His hand went to his still-bruised throat as he spun away. She could not see his face from where she lay, but she could well imagine the mortification of being seen so plainly.

Thor was silent, reaching a hand towards the bruising on Loki’s neck and hesitating when he flinched. “Brother,” he said, and there was something pained and lost in his voice. “Do you hurt still?”

Loki swallowed. “He crushed my throat, Thor. What do  _ you _ think?”

_ Enough. _ She sent tendrils of her seiðr out, checking the state of the defences. Whatever Loki had done had been sufficient; the gates had been repaired somewhat. Certainly enough to ensure that they could hold the perimeter. There was something ruined and burnt just outside the western gate and she did not look too closely at it, not wishing to have the stench of it on her. She would deal with it later.

She got up, a hand to her chest, feeling the echo of Thor’s blows fading as her seiðr erased the last traces of them from the fortifications and from her body. “Do you plan to whine for the rest of eternity, Loki? It has become tiresome already. Do not make me wish for oblivion sooner, brother.”

“ Sister,” Thor said, and he sounded - of all things -  _ contrite _ . “I did not realise my blows were upon you, as much as the gates. I apologise.”

_ Spare me. _ She rolled her eyes. “And yet you do not apologise for assaulting my city, I note.” He looked discomfited and she drew some small pleasure in that. “Do not worry yourself. If a simple blow could have felled me, little god, you would have triumphed during our last encounter.” She smirked. “How’s the eye?” The prosthetic was good, she had to give him that. He was still mismatched, though; one brown eye and one blue.  _ Odin’s blue-eyed boy… _

Thor did not look away, but met her gaze head-on. “It sees.”

“ Thor didn’t mean to re-open hostilities,” Loki jumped in, practically forcing himself between them. “He was merely seeking entrance.”

“ Yes.” Hela’s smile widened. “To  _ me _ .”

Gratifyingly, Thor could blush as prettily as Loki, it seemed. “I -” He ran out of words, glancing desperately at Loki.

At Loki, who had more colour in his cheeks than had been there for  _ years _ .

At Loki, who had betrayed her and cost her a kingdom - and would likely cost her a second one shortly - and who she could not (quite) bring herself to destroy.

At Loki, who was  _ hers. _

“ So,” Hela said, kicking the door to her bed chamber open, her teeth bared. “Come in, then.  _ Brother. _ ”

*

They sat at the little table by the window, watching the queue stretch out from the gate, the winds whipped to a gale high above the crush of lives below.

“ They are all seeking sanctuary here?” Thor questioned, his gaze fixed on the winding queue.

Loki sipped at his drink, glancing at Hela out of the corner of his eye. “Hel is the only city on Niflheim,” he said eventually once it became apparent that Hela had no intention of engaging with Thor. “The arrivals do better if they can work together.” He hesitated. “And if they have a protector.”

Thor nodded at this, looking unsurprised somehow. “I did not consider the arrangements here,” he admitted. “I had thought…” he trailed off.

“ You thought me a monster,” Hela said, her voice ice. “I am your queen, and you sought to destroy me.”

Thor bristled. “You killed thousands of Aesir!”

Hela shrugged. “And they are lucky they went to Valhalla and not attempted entrance here. I would not have been merciful. I  _ am _ not merciful,” she amended, with a sharp glance at Loki, “to those who would betray me.”

Loki had the good sense to bow his head at that.

Thor evidently did not. “A queen who would destroy her kingdom is no queen,” he said. His mismatched eyes flashed lightning in an echo of their earlier confrontation. “They owed you no loyalty.”

“ Well,” Hela said, with a smile sharp as a blade, “and so I owed them no mercy.”

Thor did not seem to have a ready answer to that, although his glower spoke volumes. Most of them, Hela suspected, on the nature of the royal pardon and the necessity for mercy in the face of treason. Hela would have said that it was pure hypocrisy on Thor’s part, but he had welcomed Loki back with open arms time and again, despite Loki’s repeated treason. So perhaps it wasn’t hypocrisy, but rather idiocy, that was the problem. The again, had she not done much the same thing?

“ Sister,” Thor began, heedless of Hela’s raised eyebrow at the familiarity, “I did not come here to argue with you.”

“ You astonish me. A man of your doubtless intellect, shrinking from a debate?”

“ I came,” Thor went on stolidly, and he put a hand on the startled Loki’s knee, “to fetch Loki back with me. He is needed away from here.”

“ Yes,” Hela said, and sat back in her chair. “I rather thought it might be something like that.” She smiled at Loki, who looked equal parts astonished and horrified. “What say you, Liesmith? Will it be Hel, or the plains outside? I believe you know now how to draw your sustenance.” She raised an eyebrow at the winding queue outside the gates.

“ I did not mean Niflheim,” Thor broke in.

“ I  _ know _ what you meant,” Hela said sharply. “But that is not one of the options on offer.” Yes, this was a  _ much _ better option than simply flaying the skin off the pretty little snake. She’d only end up tending to his wounds if she succumbed to temptation. This way, she could make him choose his own poison - and stick to it. Perhaps she’d end up being lucky, and take Thor’s power to add to her own. Not enough to  _ leave _ Hel, but enough - she hoped - to  _ protect  _ it. Of course, she did not think that Thor would surrender one iota of his power to her willingly, unlikely Loki. Well, so much the better. She could do with a good fight. 

Loki swallowed. “Thor,” he started, glancing at Hela nervously. “While your single-mindedness is… sweet, I really don’t think…”

“ Not now, brother,” Thor said, and squeezed Loki’s knee. He stood. “Sister. Will you give him to me willingly, or must I take him?” He stood, slowly enough to not startle, but clearly displaying his intent in the gathering of lightning about his person.

There was something else there, as well, Hela thought, as she summoned her own armour and vanished the table and chairs, dumping Loki on his arse when he did not stand up quickly enough. Something in the light of his remaining eye, perhaps. Something that was…

_ Oh. _

_ Fucking fertility god, _ Hela thought sourly.  _ And fucking _ Odin.  _ He couldn’t have his new golden boy turning out even a little bit like me, oh no. _ “You can,” she allowed. “But what will be left of whatever you take back, brother?” Her eyes flickered to Loki who stared back at her, pale-faced. “I could fight you for him, and let him come back as a draugr. Or you could win, and he comes back as an infant.” She looked back at Thor, at his stony visage. None of this looked to be a shock to him.  _ Maybe not an idiot, after all. _ “Neither of them are what you are after, I think. Not much use in a fight.”

“ No,” Thor allowed. “That much is true.” His grip on the axe was loose but sure, his stance solid. He looked… 

_Hmmm._ _A defensive stance, not an offensive one._ “And so you don’t _want_ me to fight you. You want me to _help_ you.” She took no pains to hide her smile. “Well, well. And what would I gain from this, hmmm? Your actions have lost me one kingdom already, and I will likely lose a second one soon.” Loki paled at this, glancing back out at the endless queues. “You seem surprised, brother,” she mocked, her voice sweetly venomous. “And here I thought you had understood the reason for your penance. I’ve done the maths. We’ll lose the fight against entropy… just.” She’d done her best. With Loki’s powers added to hers, she could almost keep pace with the growth of the howling wind and the relentless wail of the ever-lengthening queue battering at the city gates. She could almost keep things balanced, keep Hel intact, keep what she had built from being devoured by the wind.

_ Almost. _

Maybe - before she lost the inevitable battle with Niflheim and the winds outside - she could have both of them as ornaments, for a time.  _ A nice matching set in the courtyard. _ It would cheer her up each time she returned from a cull.

“ Look -” Loki began, and Thor clamped a hand over his mouth.

“ That’s right,” he agreed. “I want you to send him back, just like - that  _ was _ you before, wasn’t it? On Svartalfheim?”

“ Svartalfheim?” She laughed. “Yes. One occasion amongst many. You have not kept a close eye on him, Thor. He has died more times than I have patience, and yet here you are, to ask for another boon. And on what basis, Odinson? What will you give me for him?” She glanced at Loki scornfully. “After he has betrayed you… how many times? It makes me wonder why this matters to you so much.”

She stepped closer, wrapping a hand around Loki’s elbow and tugging him away from Thor, towards her. She ran a hand through his hair, smiling at Thor’s expression. Loki, she knew, looked even more like her dressed as he was in an echo of Hela’s armour - black and green and seiðr layered like a cloak about him. “Are you here to claim your little catamite, Thor?” She asked softly, and watched with malicious glee as Loki winced. Thor’s eyes flickered between the two of them, a thunderous expression on his brow. “Oh - he hasn’t told you, has he? Naughty boy.” She tutted. “And here you made me think that the link between the two of you was so very strong. A case of wishful thinking?” She tilted her head to one side. “Or have you been using your seiðr to sip at forbidden vintage, brother?” Loki, she was gratified to see, looked too horrified for speech, paling rapidly in her grasp.

Thor stepped close to them, unable to physically pull Loki away but unwilling to back down. “What is between the two of us is none of your concern,” he said tightly. “And I will not allow you to speak of what you do not understand.”

“ What I do not understand?” She blinked at him, all innocent, then back at where Loki seemed ready to sink into the ground. “You didn’t tell him?”  _ Did you think to keep me a secret, brother? _ she thought viciously, and her lip curved.

“ No,” Loki said, dry-mouthed. “No, I did not.” In this, as in so many other things, he had kept his own counsel. 

Well, perhaps he had more cause to do so on this point, knowing as she did that his memories of her were denied him when he was away from her. But that did not matter one whit to her rage.

“ _ Oh. _ Well, in that case, let me have the pleasure of it.” She reached out a hand and grabbed a hold of Thor’s short hair, ignoring his hiss, and brought his face close enough for her lips to graze his jaw. Beside her, Loki tensed, watching them. “Loki has been a part of my court for centuries, dear brother,” she hissed. “While you were still a puling infant, he was in my arms, with my seiðr giving him succor. Five times have I restored him to life, when by all rights I should have taken him that first time and used his seiðr as fuel for my city, stripped his form bare and rooted him as a tree to welcome the damned to Hel. But no - I sent him back to you. I healed his hurts and I gave him advice and  _ yes _ , I fucked him, in my throne room and right here -” she waved a hand at the floor of the bedchamber and was absurdly pleased to see Thor take a step back, as if he was stepping in something. “And you dare come to me and speak of prior claim? I held the brat in my arms when he was but a year old!”

“ And I held him when he was younger,” Thor said stolidly, his shoulders squared for a fight, bristling in her grasp. “We slept in the same cradle. We played together, and were held together, and were loved together. That you have given him back to me - for that, I am grateful -” and Loki made a choking sort of sound beside her, as if he’d tried to say something and his throat would not cooperate. “But it does not mean that you have a claim on him, sister. He was mine before he was yours. He is  _ still _ mine, whether you have taken him to bed or no.” His gaze narrowed. He looked thoughtful, suddenly. “And if that is what will settle it, it is easy enough to fix, I think.” He glanced across at Loki, something unbearably open and soft in his gaze. “Though it is not precisely the circumstances I had thought to bring it about.”

She let go, disgusted, and slid a knife between his ribs with the same movement. “ _ Sentiment, _ ” she hissed, shoving him away. Loki caught him as he stumbled. “You think that will settle anything? You come to me in my realm, after what you’ve done - after your  _ treason _ and what it will cost me, and the rest of the souls here - and you think I’d volunteer someone who has been pledged to me since infancy? Why? Because you were bundled together? You think  _ that _ will sway me?”

“ No,” Thor said stolidly, plucking out the knife. Loki reached down and healed him silently, his fingers lingering on the rip in Thor’s armour, on the thin sliver of abdomen it exposed. Thor’s eyes flickered up to him, and he coloured. “No, that’s not why.” He could not seem to look away from Loki’s face, hovering over his. His lips curved in a smile. “Sentiment,” he echoed. “I did wonder.”

Loki shrugged, helping him to his feet. “I did not remember Hel in between sojourns here,” he offered. “You may not believe me, but it is the truth.”

“ I believe it.” Thor’s hand slid up from Loki’s arms to cradle Loki’s head, tugging his head to one side to expose the bruised column of his throat, the bones carefully regrown. “You are healed.”

“ Yes.”

“ Hela?”

“ _ Yes _ .” His voice was tight. He touched his fingertips to Thor’s mouth, tracing the curve of his lips. His hand trembled.

“ How touching,” Hela sneered. “Is this display meant to appeal to me?” Maybe she would not have them together. Maybe she’d cut them into distance markers and plant them in the barren ground at intervals, so that their limbs would encircle all of Niflheim. Maybe she would use them as part of Hel’s funeral pyre, maybe she would -

“ Hela,” Loki said, his back still to her. “ _ Sister. _ ” He did not say anything else.

“ I could speak to you of Thanos,” Thor said, looking to her. “Of the billions dead at his hand. At the nightmare he has brought to the universe.” He took a deep breath. “But I will not. You know these things already, I think. And the affairs of the outside realms are not your concern.”

“ No,” she agreed. “They are not. The dead are already here, Odinson. The others...” She shrugged. “They are someone’s problem. I care not for them.” Not when she had her own problems weighing on her.

“ But the affairs of Hel, I think... those concern you greatly. So I will speak instead, sister, of the the queues outside your gates, of the billions still waiting, of the billions who will spend an  _ eternity _ waiting, because their lives were snatched away by the Mad Titan. I will -”

Loki’s hand closed over his mouth, over his desperate litany. “ _ She knows. _ ” He hissed. His colour was high up in his cheeks, mortification and horror combined. “She knows, Thor. Why do you think she wanted the Eternal Flame?”

Thor’s eyes widened. “Entropy,” he said softly. “That’s what you meant by it earlier? Then…” he seemed stunned by this, his gaze flickering back to where the queue outside began and did not end, stretching away from Hel as far as the eye could see. 

“She knew before we did.  _ She sent me back to Thanos _ , she was why-” he broke off, swallowing. After a moment, Loki let go and stepped away. Away from Thor. Away from Hela herself. When he looked back at her, his eyes were bright and filled with seiðr. “Sister,” he said gently. “You know I am yours. You said it yourself, we cannot do this on our own. We must find another way, or all will be lost, forever. What does a little delay to your vengeance matter? When I would be doing the work of Hel? When I would be doing  _ your _ work?” His hand was cool as it closed over hers. “Sister,” Loki whispered, his breath ghosting over her. “If there is a chance, however remote, that we might undo what has been done…”

_ Not the devoured, _ Hela thought, and she glanced back at the queues outside.  _ Not those I have already erased.  _ They were gone forever. Not even unwinding time itself would bring them back from the nothing they had become.

But what did that matter to her? What did it matter if the weeping masses outside were destroyed or restored, as long as they were  _ gone _ ? What did  _ any _ of it matter as long as Hel itself remained?

And… 

She narrowed her eyes. Her birthright.  _ Hers _ . The spoils she had brought back from war, the jewel in the Asgardian crown that Thor had tried to take from her. “My price, Odinson,” she reminded him. “I will not relinquish it.”

Thor dipped his head. “Asgard is destroyed. It took the Eternal Flame with it.” He glanced at Loki, at the strange look in his eyes. “Didn’t it?”

Loki shrugged. He did not let go of Hela. “We haven’t looked. And it  _ is _ Eternal. Or, supposed to be.” He looked at Hela, smiling a little. “I suppose it is useless to ask you what you intend to do with the Flame?”

The dead restored back to their realms, Thanos no longer a threat to her kingdom. Hel’s defences buttressed against assault, seiðr-rich and unsullied.

And her army, bright with green fire, bright with  _ her _ fire, able to go forth between the realms, her banners held high. 

(And Loki, who still wore the black and green, even now, and looked at her the way he had when he’d been but an infant and she had been the most wonderful thing in the universe.)

She smiled. “Ask nicely, Loki. I want to hear you  _ beg. _ ”

Loki’s hand slipped down to her waist, pulling her to him. His other hand he held out behind him, waiting.

After a moment, Thor stepped close, one hand in Loki’s, the other reaching around to settle tentatively on Hela’s hip, as warm as Loki’s hand was cool. There was hesitation in his eyes, but trust, too. Not for her - never for her - but for  _ Loki _ . Loki, who was pinned between the two of them as a shard of glass, who joined the two of them together. Loki, the stolen child beloved of both the heirs of Odin, who betrayed them both by turn and yet his spirit lived still.

“ _ Sister, _ ” Loki murmured, his seiðr-bright eyes fluttering closed. His black hair was a tangle around his pale face. “Hela,” Loki said, and he was the brat on the bridge, and the child in her arms, and the man she’d fucked and thought to own, pressing his forehead against hers, his breath sweet on her lips. “Sister,  _ please. _ ”

*

fin

**Author's Note:**

> The idea of Hel being created out of the bodies of its inhabitants is (obviously) not mine, and draws on basically every depiction of the afterlife I could lay my hands on. I take full responsibility for turning Hela into a beleaguered city mayor. ~~But, listen, Marvel evidently didn't know what to do with her because they tried to kill the Goddess of **Death** so frankly this is a small crime in comparison to that.~~
> 
> I have no explanation for why Loki’s eye colour seems to cause Marvel so many problems, so Hela’s influence seemed as good an option as any. (Let’s all pretend for a moment that Cate Blanchett’s eye colour is on the greener side of grey.) Artistic licence, or… something. 
> 
> For eagle-eyed readers there are bonus Babylon 5 and Monty Python Easter eggs, because I am evidently a child who can't stop quoting all her favourites.


End file.
